She learned which men had children.
Which were divorced.
Which had served overseas.
Which had buried parents.
Which had stopped drinking.
Which still slept badly.
The most surprising part was how carefully she remembered.
One afternoon she asked Diesel whether his sister’s surgery had gone well.
He stared at her.
“I told you about that two months ago.”
Lily shrugged.
“I remember important things.”
Another day, she noticed Preacher standing near the oncology elevator instead of entering her room.
She rolled her IV pole toward him.
“You’re hiding.”
“I’m standing.”
“You’re hiding while standing.”
Preacher smiled.
She did not.
“Why?”
His smile disappeared.
His eleven-year-old son had died of leukemia seventeen years earlier.
Lily knew only that hospitals made him quiet.
She reached into her coat and removed a grape sucker.
“Emergency medicine.”
Preacher took it.
Later, I found him alone beside his motorcycle crying so hard he could barely breathe.
Lily never mentioned it.
But after that, she always saved grape suckers for him.
---
Then came the purple notebook.
Nobody knew where it came from.
One day it simply appeared beside Lily’s hospital pillow—a thick purple spiral notebook decorated with silver stars.
She guarded it viciously.
Tiny tried to peek once.
She slapped it shut.
“Private royal business.”
He put both hands up.
“Understood.”
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“Things.”
“What things?”
“Secret things.”
“About us?”
She looked offended.
“Maybe.”
“Anything good?”
“Some.”
That answer worried me.
The notebook followed her everywhere.
During infusions, she wrote.
While waiting for blood tests, she wrote.
When she felt too sick to talk, she would rest the notebook across her knees and slowly fill pages.
Sometimes she asked strange questions.
“Bear, what day did you first bring all the motorcycles?”
“February twelfth.”
She wrote it down.
“Preacher, what day did you cry by the vending machine?”
Preacher nearly dropped his coffee.
“I did not.”
She stared at him.
He surrendered.
“March third.”
She wrote that too.
“Tiny, when did your wife leave?”
Tiny’s eyebrows climbed.
“Your Majesty, some questions are invasive.”
“What day?”
“April nineteenth.”
More writing.
We assumed Lily was keeping a diary.
We were wrong.
---
By late spring, the treatments became harder.
Lily lost weight.