When we publish this, I won’t cut or edit your ending—I made a promise I wouldn’t rewrite your stuff—but we’re going to include my notes, all of them. I do feel bad that I have the last word, or I’m taking the last word. If I was a bigger person, maybe I wouldn’t need to.

I’m not a hundred percent clear on how and when this manuscript was finished and then printed out. Let’s work out the timeline. I didn’t find the book until after the cops came by the house to tell me they’d found your body. You’d been missing for more than two days at that point. After the cops left, I drifted upstairs in shock, and I don’t know why, but I was afraid/freaked out. It was like that instant blast of grief was too much to handle, so I had to convert some of it to irrational fear, or the not-so-irrational fear of being alone. It took all I had to work up the courage to go into your music/writing room area. The printed-out, neatly stacked manuscript was on your desk.

The night you stormed out of the house, I stayed up as late as I could, like a nervous parent waiting for you to come home. I fell asleep eventually, and then later, God knows what time, I heard you come in through the front door and shut it quietly, and then you pattered up the creaking stairs, and man, I was so relieved. You came back. I was convinced that you wouldn’t. But the next morning, you and your car were gone again, so at the time, I assumed I’d dreamed your late-night return.

Here’s where I’m at: I think you came home to write and print the ending, the section about our last night together, and then you went to Eddie’s, or went back to Eddie’s. Based on what I know now, it’s possible you went to Eddie’s first then came back home to finish the book and then went back to his place. Whatever. You coming back home, that’s when you had to have written the rest of this. Because how else would you know it would be our last night? Fuck, even I am now thinking like this is a memoir and not a novel. How you wrote about the jacket puppet fight and your whiteboard presentation to me and how it was our last conversation has me shook because it’s true. And if that’s true, maybe the rest of this is true.

I wish I knew beforehand you weren’t coming back. I wasn’t ready.