Along the corridor, Rosa was in her bedroom, sorting through what I assumed were Józef’s belongings. From the side, her slender frame made her look vulnerable. Her elbows were clenched against her body and she was holding an item to her nose and drinking in its smell. Away from the ground-floor walls, the room felt less damp but didn’t have proper heating, just an electric bar heater. On the outside wall, the wood-chip wallpaper was peeling away from the plaster around the window, where a pipe or gutter had been leaking. This wasn’t a year of poor maintenance. Had the decline been so gradual over the years that it hadn’t registered? Or had Rosa really not realised how bad things had got? ‘Knock, knock,’ I said.

‘Hello, Maya, love.’ She was perching on the edge of the bed, on a floral counterpane, kneading a man’s shirt and staring at it, as though she couldn’t quite believe that its owner wasn’t going to wear it again.

‘Oh, Mrs Feldman.’ It was a heart-breaking sight.

‘I keep expecting him to walk through the door. To hear his whistle. Smell his clothes when he’d been smoking. Hear him calling up the stairs. It’s been a year, but I still can’t believe I’m not going to see him again.’

I swallowed, not wanting to burden her with my own grief by saying I knew exactly what she meant.

She placed the shirt on the bed next to a cluster of photographs and her hand lingered for a moment on the cloth. ‘These are from when we got married.’ She picked one up, in a polished silver multiframe. ‘In over forty years of marriage, we were best friends.’ There were no tears in Rosa’s eyes, none streaming down her face, but the sunken eye sockets and dark bags under them suggested she was resigned to her losses, and had been crushed by them.

I took the battered frame, eager not to say anything which would upset Rosa further. In one of the photos, a bright-eyed couple beamed at each other in spring sunshine. Guests cheered as Rosa got ready to launch her bouquet into the crowd. ‘What a lovely picture. And precious memories.’

‘There are more there beneath the glass.’ She pointed at the wooden dressing table by the wall. ‘There are a few of Józef with some of his friends from the tennis club, and Agnieszka and Tomasz when they were babies.’

I glided over to the antique dresser and my gaze fell on the pictures. They’d all faded and gone brown. It seemed insensitive to whisk Rosa through her memories and dash off. I removed the mirror, her hairbrush, the perfume; lifted the glass carefully and slid out the delicate images. They curled in my hand. I studied each one before passing them over. Józef Feldman with an older man, outside the shop. ‘Was this his father?’