He remembered everyone. I’d asked him about it once. “How do you keep track of all these people?”
He’d smiled the way he always did when a question amused him. “I don’t.”
“You clearly do.”
“No.” He’d looked out the window instead of at me. “I just try to pay attention while they’re talking.”
I’d laughed at the time, thinking it was modesty. Now I understood it had been the truest thing he ever told me. Paying attention had been his entire way of loving people — mine included.
Three days after the funeral, I went back to his attorney’s office, a narrow room above a bookstore that smelled like old paper and burnt coffee. I set the green backpack down beside my chair, lighter now than it had ever been in Thomas’s hands.
“I read the notebook,” I told him.
He nodded, unsurprised. “I thought you might, eventually.”
