When I got home, I saw that we had new neighbors who were moving in. The building manager had disabled the elevator to prevent the movers from misusing it.

My apartment was on the fifth floor. My car was packed with belongings, and I had no energy left to carry all of them upstairs. Psychologically and physically, I was completely drained.

I rang the building manager’s apartment and asked if he could turn the elevator on for a few minutes.

While I was bargaining with the manager’s wife, someone came very close behind me and said quietly in my ear, “Ms. Mahta, why don’t I have one of the workers help you and carry your things up to your door?”

My brain froze for a second. The voice was familiar, but the person it belonged to had no business being behind me at that time of day.

I turned around and looked at him.

I had recognized the voice correctly.

It was the very man who should not have been there at that hour.

Engineer—the son of my mother’s colleague, whose name I could not remember at that exact moment.

So this was their move.

His mother had retired less than a year after I rejected his proposal, and we had heard nothing from them since.

I suppose it wasn’t strange that the most important question in my mind at that moment was whether he had gotten married.

It seemed unlikely that he had remained single. He was five years older than me, so he would now have been around thirty. Even back then, his mother had been determined to find him a wife.

I tried to take a quick, sharp look at the furniture and boxes coming off the truck, trying to figure out whether they belonged to a family or a single man. There wasn’t much left that could give me a clue.

With delight—and almost too loudly—I said, “Heeey! Hello! How are you?”

The exaggerated length of my greeting was mostly because I had intended to say, “Hello, Mr…” But suddenly I realized I couldn’t remember his name. My brain issued an emergency order: stretch the greeting so the awkward pause wouldn’t be obvious.

I tried to find some trace in his eyes of the eagerness they had once held—especially now that I had greeted him so warmly.

I found nothing.

No eagerness. No resentment. Just one acquaintance, out of politeness, offering another acquaintance some help.

So I tried to hide the ridiculous excitement that had suddenly appeared in my voice—and probably in my eyes too—and reminded myself that I had rejected his marriage proposal. Nothing had changed since then that gave me any reason to be this excited.

I quickly ended the conversation and walked toward my car. He told one of the workers to help me and then went and sat in his own car.

I had expected him to involve himself a little more, but he didn’t.

I told the worker to go up to the fifth floor. I picked up my backpack, pressed the lock button on my car, and slammed the door.

That was when I realized I had left the key inside.