He knows it’s a fool’s errand to argue with me, so he relents and follows the directions. As we get closer to the house, I shut off the emotionless voice of the GPS and guide my dad on my own. He glances at me suspiciously as he takes a right turn when I tell him to.

“So, we’ve been here before,” I admit. “We’ve never, like, gone inside.”

When we round our way into their cul-de-sac, he asks me one more time if I’m absolutely sure that I want to drop a bomb into the life of two elderly strangers.

“They had it coming,” I reply as I get out of the car.

The house has been graced with a fresh coat of yellow paint, which is almost as bright and offensive as the seafoam green color it used to be. Despite a dry winter, the front lawn is still pristine. It looks like they’ve added another dozen or so pink flamingo yard ornaments, peeking out through a new flower bed of blooming poppies. Quarantine projects, I think to myself.

It’s mostly quiet except for the sound of the annoying ornate wind chimes hanging off a tree. As I open the front gate, I realize that maybe the pandemic has made me lose sight of boundaries and social norms. The timid Parisa from a year ago would never be here. She’d never even think about doing anything like this. But being here feels like the least I can do for Gabriela, and that’s what I tell myself as I ring the doorbell.

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice asks from behind the door.

“Um, my name is Parisa. I’m a friend of your… granddaughter.”

“I don’t have a granddaughter,” the woman replies.

“Are you Reina Gonzales?” I ask.

“Yes, but I don’t have a granddaughter,” she says. “You have the wrong house.”

“She’s Julia’s daughter.”

I fully expect her to tell me to go away, but instead the door pops open. The woman standing in front of me looks like a weathered version of the photograph from her youth. Her brown curls are now charcoal colored, and her freckles are hard to make out between the creases on her face. I can see pools of water filling her eyes.

“Sorry,” she says, quickly wiping her tears away before they can make a proper journey down her face. She nervously grabs a mask and uses it to cover her mouth, without strapping it on. “What did you say?”

“Julia’s daughter… her name’s Gabriela and she’s sick,” I tell her. “I think she’d want to hear from you.”