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.”

“That’s the saddest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“It’s not sad,” Mr. Sato said, sharply, and it was the only time in eighteen months I ever heard him raise his voice. “Forgive me. It isn’t sad. It’s a cost. He knew the cost, he paid it every night, and he did not complain about it once in thirty-four years of being my client. A man who spends his life on something and pays for it isn’t sad, Willa. He’s expensive. There’s a difference and I’d like the record to have it.”PART 4

I found four of them.

That’s what I did with the next eighteen months, and I want to explain how, because I thought it would be impossible and it was not.

The notebook has names.

Full names, dates, and the true thing.

So I started with the ones where the true thing was findable.

“June 3, 1994. Odalys Pereira. Her son is in Ellisbrook and doesn’t know she moved.”

I found the son.

He’s sixty now, retired, and when I called him and read him that line he did not speak for a long time and then he said, “She moved? When did she move?” and I said 1994, and he said, “I’ve been writing to an address in Fairhaven for thirty-one years,” and I heard a man in his sixties find out that thirty-one years of unanswered letters had gone to a building his mother left before she d*ed.

He’d thought she’d stopped answering.

She’d never gotten one.

I could not fix that.

What I could do was read him the rest of her entry, which I did, twice, and which says that the true thing Odalys Pereira wanted somebody to know was: “Her son is in Ellisbrook and doesn’t know she moved.”

His name is Rómulo.

And on that phone call — which lasted an hour and eleven minutes and which I recorded with his permission because by then I had understood that this was the actual work — he asked me a question I’ve since been asked by every one of them.

“Was he there? At the end? Actually there, or in and out?”

“The notebook says nine hours.”

“Nine hours.” A long silence on a line from another state. “I have spent thirty-one years thinking my mother d*ed in a room by herself because she was too proud to write me back.”