She had died as she had lived: alone, unadmired, clutching a forged proof of a love she had never managed to earn, because earning it would have required her to be vulnerable, to be honest, to risk being seen as she actually was — and that was the one thing, in eighty years, she had never once been brave enough to do.

Desmond understood her now because he had come so close to becoming her.

He too had preferred a comforting lie to a painful truth.

He too had once been willing to destroy the people who loved him honestly rather than face himself.

The difference between them, in the end, was a single choice he had made and she never had: at the last possible moment, offered the truth in a bank record and a rubber stamp, he had looked.

And she, offered a thousand chances to look at herself, had reached instead for the notebook, and written herself one more note, and signed it in a stranger’s name.