Part1: For months I left food at my neighbor’s door without knowing that that plate was the only thing keeping him going. The day he died, his family knocked on my door with a note that broke me in two.

The woman looked down at the bag of Tupperware, as if she were also carrying inside it all the months I had left them in front of that door.—”Come in,” I said, even though my apartment was a mess, even though the onion was still cut open on the chopping board, even though I felt that one extra word could break me. She walked in slowly. Not like a visitor. Like someone returning to a place where they left something buried.

She sat on the kitchen chair and placed the bag on her lap. I turned off the stove because the oil was starting to smoke. The smell of onion hung between us, harsh, familiar, much like any given afternoon with Mr. Arthur yelling at me from the hallway that my soup looked like mop water. —”My name is Claire,” she said. “I’m the oldest daughter.” I didn’t know what to say.

For months, Mr. Arthur had talked about his children the way one talks about people living in another country, even if they only lived forty minutes away. “Claire was always the most serious one,” he would say. “Even as a little girl, she sounded like a lawyer, even when asking for a popsicle.” I had imagined her as distant, cold, the kind of person who answers calls in a rush and sends money so they don’t have to send affection.