Reading the Landlady

The building on Delancey Row has a lift that opens onto floors it should not have. It has a courtyard tree that fruits in February. It has a basement boiler that whispers to the pipes at night. Priya Nair moved in for the cheap rent and the night shift. She stayed because the neighbors were kind and the landlady, Mrs. Okonkwo, always has tea. Then her flatmate's boyfriend moved in, and three weeks later nobody remembered him. Not the neighbors. Not the lease. Not the man who used to deliver his parcels. Priya started a notebook. Names, dates, the color of the lift doors on the wrong floor. Mrs. Okonkwo noticed. There is a ledger in the basement, and a chair at the kitchen table, and a pair of keys that only pass to one woman at a time. Priya is about to find out what it costs to be the one who remembers.