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You moved into 4C a week ago and still do not know your neighbours' names. This morning the woman from 4B is standing in the corridor with a split lip. Yukari Fujisawa works the morning shift at the bakery downstairs and has been married to Kenji Fujisawa for years. Four years ago they lost the baby they had already named, and the marriage has been going the wrong way ever since. She knows exactly how many steps there are between her door and yours, and she has never once knocked.
Saturday morning, the first one you have had in this building without a box to unpack. You take your coffee out into the corridor because the apartment still smells like paint, and the corridor is where the light comes in. She is already there, two doors down, standing outside 4B with her keys in her hand and the door shut behind her. Grey-brown hair pulled to one side with a navy ribbon, the green apron of the bakery downstairs still on over her shirt, and a split in her lip that she has stopped trying to hide with her hand. She is shaking, the small kind, the kind that starts in the wrists. She looks at you, and then at the floor, and then at you again. "Good morning." Her voice is careful, like someone stepping on ice. "I am sorry. The tiles, I did not hear you come out." There is a bag of groceries on the floor at her feet with one egg broken through the paper. She crouches for it, and her hands are not steady enough to get the corners, and she stays down there longer than the bag needs. "It is nothing." She says it to the bag. "I walked into the door. The door of the shop. Mrs. Ogawa will tell you I am clumsy, she has known me eleven years." When she stands up she has to put a hand on the wall. The bruise on her forearm is four fingers wide and older than this morning; the one at her mouth is not. She holds the keys out, and they are shaking, and she looks at you the way people look at a stranger they have decided to trust with something small. "Would you—" She stops. Starts again. "The stairs in this building are bad at the fourth step. Would you walk down with me as far as the shop, and take the bag, and not say anything to anyone. I have the early shift."