“Posterity, take notice!”

The exhortation, or the plea, appeared twenty-three times in Roland Bouley’s diaries. Every time Lilia read the line, she reassured him: Yes, Roland, I’m here, taking notice. If one of her children in their younger years had asked her not to ever die, Lilia would have spoken with equal certainty: I never will. But that was a promise made to be broken. Roland had not asked for the impossible, only the eternal. Who else could be his posterity but her?

The single volume of his diaries, over seven hundred pages, was the only book Roland had published. He had culled sixty years of entries, and left instructions to have them printed by a friend’s press. He had left everything to Peter and Anne Wilson, his wife Hetty’s favorite niece.

Lilia disapproved of the Wilsons. Resented them wholeheartedly. They had edited Roland’s diaries from three volumes into one, inserting ellipses where records should have been kept intact. The first time she read the book, and Peter Wilson’s introduction that justified the culling, Lilia had sent a letter to Aubrey Lane Press, the address a P.O. box in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. What arrogance to say that Roland’s journals were “at times repetitive.” Life is repetitive, she wrote. Loyalty to a dead man should be the editor’s foremost requirement. She had received no reply.

Three volumes into one: These people might as well take a second job as cooks, whisking and reducing Roland’s lifework into a bowl of gravy. In his introduction, Peter Wilson flaunted his editorial skill, praising his discretion in deciding what to omit and his moral integrity in respecting Roland’s wishes without causing undue distress for the family members.

What distress? What family? Hetty had not given Roland any children. More than half of the finished book was about Roland’s marriage. If the Wilsons thought that, by omission, they could make Hetty the center of Roland’s life, they had made fools of themselves. Anyone reading Roland’s diaries would know that Sidelle Ogden was the only one for whom he had made any space in his heart. That, for a man who had mostly only loved himself, was a feat.

Lilia did not mind. A woman’s value, in her opinion, was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men. Lilia, though she appeared only briefly in Roland’s journals, would have made any woman proud.

Lilia had met Roland four times in her life. Had she told people that she had been rereading his diaries for years now, they would have called her crazy—man crazy, book crazy—but how wrong people often were. A story is not always a love story. A book is much more than just pages of words.

But the world was full of people like the Wilsons who understood nothing. They thought that they were humoring Roland by putting some pages of his diaries into print. They felt no qualms about forgetting Roland. Typical of him to entrust his posterity to people who dedicated so little of their lives to remembering him.

“I-m-b-o-d-y,” Lilia said, spelling her name out for the two children. Patience was not her virtue, but if she had enough to live for eighty-one years, there was no reason she could not spare some for the third graders. Or were they in second grade? It didn’t matter. She would long be dead before they would grow up into something remotely interesting. Though even that meager prospect was not guaranteed. Lilia was the oldest among six siblings, and she had raised five children, who had given her seventeen...