The next morning, Granny Ng found that she’d woken up half an hour earlier than usual and that the closet reeked of urine. She stuffed some tissue paper into her nostrils and crossed her arms tightly as she waited for the young man to get up and out of the house. As she listened to the noises that had become so familiar by now—the jazz station on the radio, his singing, the blast of the shower, the clarinet squeakily climbing scales—each one felt like a minor affront, painfully drawing out the moments she had to spend next to the urine-caked towel.

At the slam of the front door, Granny Ng got up and filled a bucket with warm soapy water, moved the plastic storage boxes and her sleeping bag out of the way, and started scrubbing the closet floor, becoming increasingly agitated with the effort. In just a few minutes she had grown uncomfortably hot, and her back and elbows were aching.

For the rest of the day, she tried to go about her normal routine, washing the dishes or wiping down a cabinet, but she found herself suddenly filled with the dreadful sense that these experiences did not wholly belong to her. These dishes were not hers, nor was the cabinet, nor the cloth in her hand. No one even knew she was doing any of this.

“All this effort,” she muttered, “and for what?” It took a great force of will to finish each chore, and finally she gave up. The tasks she had once been eager to do now felt like a punishment, a sentence.

The lazy cleaner was coming today. When Granny Ng took her place inside the closet just before eleven o’clock, she was surprised by the sudden violence of her feelings toward Mrs. Lee.

“I do your work, and then I hide myself in here while you laze about. What use on this earth do you have?!”

Half an hour after the arrival of Mrs. Lee, during which Granny Ng imagined the woman halfheartedly dragging a cloth across the kitchen counters and stealing snacks from the fridge, the phone rang. Granny Ng heard her speak quite animatedly for about five minutes to the person at the other end, then her loud, grating laugh and the sound of the front door slamming. After waiting a while, Granny Ng came out of her hiding place and looked around. The cleaner had left a note on the fridge door for the young man: “Mr. Mok, My apologies. Must leave a few minutes early today. Son called home sick from school. Usual chores taken care of. Thank you.”