Morning came before I noticed the sky had changed. I’d slept maybe an hour, curled sideways in a kitchen chair. The backpack sat open, emptied of everything except the one thing I’d been avoiding since the lawyer first set it in my lap.
The notebook.
I finally picked it up.
Part Three: What He Had Really Been Collecting
The first page held only two sentences, written so plainly they felt less like a diary entry and more like something Thomas had needed to remind himself of daily: People think loneliness is the absence of company. Most of the time, it’s the absence of being noticed.
I read it three times. It felt familiar in a way I couldn’t place — like something I’d heard Thomas say, except I was certain he never had, not in those words.
I turned the page expecting a memoir. What I found instead were fragments — dozens of them, no names attached, no dates, just single ordinary moments recorded like field notes.
