I married a stranger from a hospital waiting room so he wouldn’t d*e alone — after our one-week marriage, his lawyer handed me his backpack, saying, “He wanted you to know the truth.”

And he’d written my answer in the book with the other eleven hundred and thirty-nine, and then, two days later, he’d asked me to marry him — which means, and I have checked the dates against the notebook eleven times, that I was in the book before I was his wife.

He wrote me down first.

Here is what the notebook is.

In 1979, Alden Voss was twenty-six years old and worked in the boiler room of a county hospital, and on a night in November he was sent up to a ward to fix a radiator, and there was a man in a bed in a room with nobody in it, and the man asked him for water.

His name was Cornelius Pike.

He was eighty-one and had outlived everyone.

Alden brought him water, and then he sat down, because Cornelius asked him to, and he sat there for six hours until his shift ended and then two hours after that, and Cornelius Pike d*ed at 4:40 in the morning holding the hand of a boiler mechanic.

The first entry in the notebook is: “November 9, 1979. Cornelius Pike. He built the courthouse steps.”

That’s the true thing.

That’s what Cornelius Pike wanted somebody to know: that the steps of the county courthouse, which ten thousand people walked up every year, had been laid by him in 1931 and that nobody had ever known it was him.

Alden wrote it down that morning in a notebook he bought at a drugstore.

And then he did it again.

Eleven hundred and forty times, over forty-six years.

He never worked at the hospital again after 1984 — he was an HVAC contractor for most of his life, with his own two-truck outfit — and what he did instead was volunteer, at four hospitals and two hospices, on the same program I was on, for four and a half decades.

He sat with people who were dy*ng alone.

That’s what he did with his life.

Not as a job. In the evenings, on weekends, after work, for forty-six years, and every single time, he asked them one question — “tell me a true thing nobody knows” — and he wrote down the answer, and he took one pull tab.

The pull tabs are the part I couldn’t work out for two days.

It’s in the notebook, on a page between 1983 and 1984, in his handwriting, and it is the only page that isn’t a list.