They were clean, her hands, but still it made Matt nervous. She carefully turned the pages, reading every word, and Matt tried not to think about the strain on each page, grazing the wire coil as Abby flipped a page up, over, and around the spring-shaped spine of the notebook. They were her pages, after all. Matt repeated this to himself to keep from taking the notebook back. He wanted her to keep reading. The best part was coming, but if even one notch of the spiral-bound page tore, it would ruin the entire notebook. “Oh,” Abby said. She stopped flipping pages and held the notebook closer to her face, and Matt knew she’d seen it. That when she stopped eating and there were no more meals or calories to count, he’d tried counting her smiles, but soon those had stopped, too. So he counted her breaths. It was all she had left to offer him, and Matt needed something for the empty yellow pages yet to be filled. Each page was supposed to cover one day, and the days were marching forward.
