Open Secrets

As he peered in through her living room window, Richard could see that there was a book, with egg-shell colored pages, open on the coffee table, just a few feet away.

It was a large book, and he recognized, even from this nose-pressed-to-the-window distance, that it contained hand written pages, in what appeared to be Lola’s large, looping handwriting.

(Richard had long thought that Lola’s writing looked like that of a 7th grade girl; she deployed large whirling stokes of the pen, and often made little smiley faces out of the dotted “I”s”—even on the checks she wrote to Richard, whenever she lent him money.)

As he looked in, all Richard could now imagine, was that a thick book like this, adorned with Lola’s handwritten pages, was probably a collection of her favorite recipes.

Little did he know now that this book would be what Lola would later refer to as “my journal,” and that it contained Lola’s most intimate thoughts, most candid confessions.

And of course, he would later discover that he would be morally conflicted when, at last, he got a chance to page through just a few of its candidly confessed secrets.