She was not quite eleven when I let Harald Engstrom pour me that glass of brandy, so that made her what Thirty-five, thirty-six in November.

That was now. But back then she’d been a little golden-haired child waiting for… well, not her father and not her uncle, because we’d never entirely defined our roles. Her father figure, anyway. The guy who made a home for her, and put food on the table, and tucked her in at night. That was the guy she’d have been waiting for, and the son of a bitch never turned up.

So what happened to her

Best-case scenario, I thought, some friend of mine took her in. A couple of times when I’d had to travel I left her with Kitty Bazerian, and maybe she’d called Kitty when I failed to reappear, and maybe Kitty gave her a home. Or maybe she wound up in an orphanage, or in a foster home, or on her own somewhere in the city.

Impossible to guess what had become of her, and each guess was more disturbing than the last. I quickened my pace and tried to concentrate on the changes in the neighborhood. Better to focus on the superficial, I decided. The important stuff was too unsettling.

My house was still there.

No one had knocked it down, I saw. Nor had it collapsed of its own accord, although I suppose it was a quarter of a century closer to doing so. But it looked the same as ever from the outside. Built sometime in the late nineteenth century, it had achieved a state of decrepitude by the time I moved in that it had been able to maintain without apparent effort ever since.

I went into the vestibule and checked the double row of buzzers. About a third of the slots lacked names – tenements generally house a few folks with a passion for anonymity – and the names I saw were not the names that had been there the last time I looked. What had become of E. GOLDSTEIN and M. VELASQUEZ and MARKOV FAMILY And who