Part Seven: The Notebook
He came back a month later with a notebook.
She recognized it immediately. Dark blue cover, slightly worn at the corners, Richard’s handwriting on the first page — not the formal handwriting of documents but the looser handwriting he used for notes to himself, the handwriting she associated with Sunday mornings and lists made at kitchen tables.
“I found it in the desk,” Thomas said. “The card table.” He held it out to her. “I think you should read it too.”
She sat with it while Thomas was there and read what she had not read before. It was not a financial document. It was not a plan. It was something more personal — the recorded wishes of a man who had been thinking, in the last years of his life, about what he hoped to leave beyond money.
That Thomas find something to work toward that isn’t an inheritance. The phrasing was careful, unsentimental. That he earn respect one person at a time, the way I did before the company existed. That he understand Charlotte before she stops expecting him to. That he stop treating people as elements in a system and start treating them as what they are.
And at the bottom of one page, a sentence that Eleanor read twice:
I want him to come home. But I want him to come home as someone he can respect, not someone I have to defend.
Thomas was sitting across the table. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the cover of the notebook, which he had apparently already read several times.
“I didn’t know him,” he said. His voice was very quiet.
“You did,” she said. “You just didn’t listen.”
He was crying, she realized. Thomas, who she had not seen cry since he was a small boy and had fallen off a bicycle and had tried not to cry and had cried anyway — Thomas was crying in her kitchen, without any particular attempt to stop.
She sat with him and did not say anything more, which was, she thought, the right thing.
