For days, the box sat in the corner of my room, untouched. It felt radioactive, glowing with the memories of a life suddenly cut short. Finally, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I gathered the courage to sit on the floor and open the flaps.

The smell of her hit me instantly—a mixture of her floral perfume and the faint scent of peppermint she always kept in her purse.

I spent hours crying over old photographs of us in the 1970s, her favorite chipped ceramic coffee mug, and a handful of silk scarves I had given her for various birthdays. As I reached the bottom of the box, my hand brushed against something smooth and worn.

I pulled it out. Inside was her address book, a thick, burgundy leather-bound thing she had owned for decades. The pages were dog-eared, the binding loose from years of use. I smiled, tracing the gold-foil letters on the cover. Gloria was old-school; she never trusted smartphones to hold her contacts, insisting that ink and paper were the only things that lasted.

I began to flip through the alphabetized pages, feeling a wave of nostalgia as I saw the names of old friends and distant relatives, many of whom had also passed on. But as I reached the very back of the book, past the ‘Z’ section, I noticed a page covered in her frantic, sprawling handwriting.

I turned to it, and the heading at the top made my breath catch in my throat. It was titled “Things to tell Janet.”. Tears welled up, blurring my vision. Beneath that heading were forty little entries, crossed off one by one with a thick blue pen.

She had been keeping a running list. Whenever she had a thought during the day, a funny observation, or a piece of neighborhood gossip she didn’t want to forget, she had written it down to share with me on our next 6:30 AM call.

I traced my fingers over the crossed-out words, decoding her messy cursive.

Tell Janet the grocery store is overcharging for strawberries again. Tell Janet I finally figured out the crossword clue we were stuck on. Tell Janet that Susan’s son is getting a divorce. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking testament to how much she valued our connection.

She didn’t want to miss a single detail of her life with me. I read down the page, crying and laughing at the same time, feeling closer to her in that moment than I had since April. But then, my eyes hit the bottom of the page.

The last one wasn’t crossed off. Unlike the other entries written in blue or black ink, this final line was written in a shaky red pen. It was dated the morning she died, and it said: “Tell Janet the chest pains are back, and they are worse this time.

If I don’t call in the morning, tell her to check the cedar chest in my guest room. The false bottom.