About the work

He’d had that particular copy of the Penguin for over forty years, a gift from his wife on their second anniversary. It had traveled in every bag he’d owned, been read on trains, planes, and hospital bedsides, even once forgotten on a park bench for an hour before he ran back for it. The spines of his other books at home were all broken in, but not like this one, not with the deliberate, careful crease of a page being turned by a thumb worn smooth with age, the same thumb that had once turned the pages of his wife's diary while she slept, just to know what she was thinking. He’d never told her he’d done that.