For as long as I can remember, the woman on the eighth floor was a mystery. She moved silently, spoke little, and never lingered in the hallways. To most neighbors, she was just the quiet lady upstairs — polite, distant, forgettable. I didn’t even know her name until one gray morning, when the police came to my door: she had passed away and somehow listed me as her emergency contact.
I agreed to go with them to her apartment, half out of curiosity, half out of guilt. The moment I stepped inside, I felt a strange ache — quiet, deep, the kind that settles in your chest before the tears even start. The apartment was immaculate, muted, frozen in time. Then I noticed the walls: hundreds of neatly framed drawings — my childhood drawings, yellowed but preserved, each one treated like a treasure.
When I was a kid, I used to leave drawings at her door — sunshine, flowers, stick-figure families. She never acknowledged them, or so I thought. Decades later, I realized the truth: she had cherished every one, framing them carefully, preserving them like fragile pieces of joy. Her silence wasn’t coldness; it was protection, a way of keeping the world from seeing how deeply she felt.
The officer encouraged me to look around. That’s when I found the box beneath her armchair. Inside were postcards, holiday cards, and handwritten notes — all gestures of kindness from neighbors over the years, including mine. Each one was dated, tied with ribbon, carefully stored. She had kept them all.
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