I held my breath when I unlocked the front door, praying my landlord wouldn’t be home. Saira Mukherjee wasn’t a bad person, but she was nosier about my comings and goings than my mother had ever been. There was a staircase from the basement to the backyard that I invariably used to exit the house away from Saira’s prying eyes, but a tall gate that couldn’t be opened from the street kept me from entering the house that way. She wasn’t around, but I heard footsteps above me. I kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and rushed downstairs to my room. I unlocked the door and quickly shut it behind me.

My dungeon room—that was how I thought of it—was tiny and devoid of natural light. The walls were an unforgiving shade of green, as if an earlier occupant had decided to imagine life inside an unripe avocado. I wasn’t allowed to paint over it, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t own much, just a futon and a folding table, a bookcase, and a lone chair for phantom guests I never actually had over. I disliked clutter, but the shelves were my secret shame, overflowing with books, photographs, and carvings. I had a bad habit of tossing mail on the bookcase. On top of a volume of Gustave Doré’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, I found what I was looking for: a large manila envelope with my name and address written in black ink in Caro’s distinctive curlicued script.

I was going to mail it if I didn’t see you, Caroline told me when she’d handed it over.

What is it?

Remember when you said you wished you had some family photos? I finally got my act together and made you a few prints. There’s more on the memory card.

I’d glanced at a few shots when I’d come home that night, noticed one that included my father, and instantly tossed the envelope on my bookcase. Out of sight, out of mind.

I extracted the envelope and reached for a protein bar before taking a seat on the futon. Inside were new prints of old family photos. On top was one of Caro and me together, hugging in front of a Christmas tree when I was five and she was ten, both of us wearing red velvet dresses with flouncy hems that our mother had sewn for us. The next was one of us with our parents, taken two years later. That was the one I’d seen a couple of weeks back, the one that made me shove the photos back into the envelope. I’d hated it because it was a lie: in that moment, we looked like a happy family, which was something we’d never been. Now that Caro was dead, my heart thudded with longing as I stared at it.