Juno brought three clean sheets to Eli’s room and left her hands on them until he chose where she should sit.
“I can make this easier to use,” she said. “I can’t make it remember for you.”
He had expected her to offer a new binding, perhaps tabs that would survive rain. Instead she had drawn columns on one sheet, leaving the others blank. Date of event. Date recorded. Source. Uncertainty. Access. The last heading disturbed him more than the others.
“You want to organize who can read it?”
“I want you to organize that. Before I accidentally assume helping with one page means permission for the next.”
The ledger lay beside his elbow. It contained facts about gates and the dead, promises he wished he had made differently, private fears that had seemed manageable when he wrote them. After yesterday, it also held a description of an experience he could no longer reach. He wanted help finding things without turning every request for help into an invitation to read his life.
He opened at an operational entry. “This one.”
Juno moved her chair so that the closed portion remained beneath his forearm. She asked him to read the passage aloud rather than drawing the book across the table. That simple arrangement relieved him, then made him ashamed of needing relief from someone who had already risked so much beside him.
