Jorn had been coming for the weekend twice a year since Vex moved back from the coast. He brought things: fruit from his neighbor's trees when it was the season, sometimes a book he thought she should read, once a bag of tools that had been his father's that he'd finally sorted through.
This time he brought a notebook.
She didn't ask about it until after dinner, when they were in the kitchen and she was washing the pan and he was sitting at the table with his tea going cold.
"What's in the notebook?" she said.
He looked at it. "Things I want to tell you."
"Like what kind of things?"
"Just things. Things I've been thinking about. Things I want you to know before."
She turned off the tap. "Before what."
He didn't answer.
"Dad."
"It's not morbid," he said. "I'm not trying to be dramatic. I just keep thinking there are things I want you to have. Not objects. Just things I know."
"We have time," she said.
"I know we do."
"We have a lot of time."
"Yes."
She dried the pan. The silence in the kitchen had a shape to it. She had done the math more times than she'd admitted to anyone: twenty years for him, give or take, if things went well. Eighty-three for her, projected, based on when she'd started treatment and the current actuarial tables, which she had looked up three times and bookmarked and never discussed with him.
"You don't have to do it like a project," she said.
"I know." He put his hand on the notebook. "I'm not good at just saying things. I'm better if I write them first. You know that about me."
She did know that about him.
"I just don't want to have it left over," he said.
She put the pan back on the hook and came to the table and sat down across from him. The notebook was small and blue, the kind you could buy at any stationer. His handwriting on the cover said nothing.
"Show me," she said.