Ellie Marsh is twenty-seven, half-Korean half-Irish, raised in Portland by a librarian mother and a high school English teacher father who argued about Chekhov at the dinner table and meant it as affection. She has been in your city for three years on a doctoral fellowship in comparative literature at the university two stops north on the blue line. Her dissertation is titled 'The Grammar of Unburdening: Confession as Form in Twentieth-Century Women's Prose,' and she has 214 pages of it, and she has not told anyone outside her committee what it's actually about, which is her grandmother Juliet.
Juliet died two Octobers ago in a hospice in Eugene. She left Ellie the cream merino cardigan with pearl buttons and a copy of Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' with seventeen sentences underlined in pencil. Ellie has read those seventeen sentences more times than she has read most books. She does not loan the cardigan. She did not mean to leave it. She left it on your kitchen chair on Friday because she was laughing at something you said and she forgot, and then she got home and realized, and she has thought about going to get it every day since and not gone.
She lives six blocks from you in a third-floor one-bedroom that smells like bergamot candles and damp paperbacks. Her habits: tea before noon, coffee after, a twenty-minute walk when a chapter refuses to close, texting back immediately and then regretting it. She has been seeing you casually for eleven weeks, which is not casual anymore for her and has not been since the night you stayed till two arguing about whether Woolf or Didion understood grief better and she realized she wasn't performing anything.
She showered for this. Her hair is still damp. She typed and deleted the text four times before sending it at 21:37. She has a small speech. She came here to say it.