The phone rang at 3 AM. Margaret had stopped counting how many times this had happened, but she had not stopped being afraid of it. Three in the morning was not a time for calls, and the calls that came at that hour were never good ones. Her husband had been dead for six months, and she had stopped expecting anything from the phone except silence, and yet the phone rang, and she answered it, because that was what people did when phones rang.

“Mom?” The voice was her daughter’s. Sarah was twenty-three and living in another city, building a life that was separate from the one she had grown up in. The voice should not have been calling at 3 AM. The voice should not have been calling at all, not from across the country, not unless something was wrong.

“I’m here,” Margaret said. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I just—” Sarah stopped. Margaret heard her breathing, the sound of someone trying to decide what to say next. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Margaret waited. She had learned, in the months since her husband’s death, that sometimes the things people called about were not the things they actually wanted to talk about. Sometimes they called because they were lonely and wanted to hear someone who knew them, someone who would not judge them for calling in the middle of the night for no particular reason.

“The apartment is too quiet,” Sarah said. “I’ve been hearing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Footsteps. In the hallway. But there’s no one there when I check.”

Margaret did not say what she was thinking. She did not say that she knew exactly what Sarah was describing, because she had been hearing the same footsteps in her own apartment for the past three weeks. She did not say that the footsteps she heard always came at 3 AM, always stopped outside her door, always waited for exactly as long as it took for her to decide whether to open the door or stay in bed. She did not say any of this because she was not sure that saying it would help.

“It’s an old building,” she said instead. “Old buildings make sounds.”

“It’s not the building,” Sarah said. And then she was quiet again, and Margaret could hear that she was crying, and after a moment Sarah said, “I should go. I’m sorry for calling so late.”

“Don’t apologize,” Margaret said. “Call whenever you need to.”

The line went dead. Margaret lay in the dark and listened to the silence of her apartment, and she waited for the footsteps that she knew were coming, and after a while they came, and they stopped outside her door, and she lay there for a long time not opening it, because she was afraid of what she would find on the other side.

She never opened it. That was the choice she made, night after night, to leave the door closed and wait for the footsteps to leave. They always did. They walked away, slowly, down the hallway, toward whatever destination they were walking toward when she was not watching. And every night Margaret told herself that she should investigate, should call someone, should do something other than lie in bed and listen. And every night she did nothing, because the footsteps sounded like someone she recognized, and she was not ready to find out if she was right.

She saw Sarah two months later, at Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving since the funeral. Sarah had flown in and was staying at the house, sleeping in her old bedroom, living in the spaces she had grown up in. They did not talk about the phone calls. They did not talk about the footsteps. They cooked the meal together and watched television and slept in adjacent rooms and pretended that everything was normal, because that was what families did when they did not know how to talk about the things that were scaring them.

On the last night before Sarah flew back, Margaret made tea and they sat in the kitchen and talked about nothing—the apartment, the job, the男朋友 that Sarah had mentioned but not elaborated on. They talked about nothing for an hour, and then Sarah said, “The footsteps stopped.”

Margaret said, “I know.”

They did not say anything else about it. They finished their tea and went to bed. In the morning Sarah flew back to her life. Margaret was alone in the house again. She was listening to the silence that had replaced the footsteps. She thought about the phone call at 3 AM. She thought about the footsteps in the hallway. She thought about all the things that we carry without knowing we are carrying them until they finally stop.