Koren copied the address onto the back of his business card and told me that my father had wanted me to have the apartment. Afterward, as we stood in the fluorescent-lit hall waiting for his elevator, sensing, perhaps, that he had not adequately conveyed some message, Koren added, “He thought it was someplace you might go sometimes.”

Why? Why, when all these years I’d never visited him there, nor had he ever invited me? I had cousins in the north of the country but was rarely in touch with them; their mother, my father’s sister, was nothing like him. My cousins are hard, practical, unsparing people. Now they already have children of their own whom they let run freely in the street, playing with sharp and rusty things. I admire them but don’t know how to speak to them. After my grandmother died, when I was ten, I’d only gone back once. There was no longer any reason to go. As if something had been decided, my father gave up speaking to me in Hebrew. I’d been answering him in English for years, and so I hardly noticed, but later I came to sense that the language he still dreamed in was an argument he had lost with someone else, not me.

Now when the stranger in my father’s apartment speaks to me, I answer reflexively in English: “I’m Adam’s daughter. Who are you?”

“You surprised me,” he says, clapping his chest. He sinks down onto the sofa, his knees falling open.

“You’re a friend of my father?”

“Yes,” he says, rubbing his throat under the open collar. The hair on his chest is sparse and gray. He gestures for me to sit, as if it were I who had appeared unannounced in his living room, and not vice versa. With shining eyes, he takes me in. “I should have guessed, you look like him. Only prettier.”

“You didn’t say your name.”

“Boaz.”

My father had never mentioned a Boaz.

“I’m an old friend,” the stranger says.

“Why do you have the keys?”

“He lets me use the place when he isn’t here. Now and then, when I come through the city. I stay in the back bedroom, and check on things for him. Last month there was a leak from upstairs.”

“My father died.”

For a moment he says nothing. I can feel him studying me.

“I know.” He stands up, turning his back to me, and easily lifts the heavy bag of groceries he’d set down earlier. But instead of leaving, as I expect—as any normal person would—he retreats to the kitchen. “I’m making something to eat,” he says without turning. “If you’re hungry, it’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

From the living room I watch him nimbly chopping the vegetables, cracking the eggs, and rummaging in the refrigerator. It annoys me to see him making himself so at home. My father is gone, and yet this stranger intends to take advantage of his hospitality. But I haven’t eaten all day.