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.”

I sat in a parking garage with my hands full of them.

Then I opened the notebook, and the first page had a date in 1979 and a name and three words after it, and I read down the page, and every line was the same shape.

A date.

A name.

And three words.

I turned to the last written page.

The final entry was a date eleven days earlier, and a name I recognized, and the number written beside it was 1,140.

PART 2

The name on the last line was mine.

“March 14. Willa Brennan. She goes around.”

She goes around.

Three words.

That’s the format — every entry, for forty-six years: a date, a name, and the one true thing the person had told him that nobody else knew.

I sat in that car for two hours.

I read about ninety pages.

I’m going to put some of them here, because a summary of that notebook is a lie — the whole force of it is that it is the same three-part shape, over and over, for forty-six years, until the repetition becomes the point.