The doctor said Mansour’s brain had shrunk to the size of a walnut. That was probably why he saw thieves everywhere, why he howled into the dead of night. Now, he was buried under heaps of dirt, but the old woman still jolted awake every night, flattening her ear against the living room wall. She would sync the rhythm of her breathing to the faint sounds bleeding through from the unit next door. Three in the morning. The neighbour’s flat was submerged in silence. No squeal of a turning faucet, no dragging of slippers. Mahsa usually woke around this hour. But lately, on certain nights, a heavy quiet hung over Apt. 4. The woman closed her eyes, willing the plaster separating them to crumble.

She moved to the window. For years, Mansour used to brag that their flat was the greatest place on earth. How he had worked himself to the bone to buy it, taking out loans, cutting out vacations—even though he was the one who eventually turned the place into a hellhole, with his screaming and those sunken eyes that no longer recognized her. Mahsa’s place, though, was different. It always smelled sweet, her favourite tunes flooding the second floor. For about two years now, the old woman had made excuses to drop in on her a few times a week. Just for those few seconds—handing over a pot of food or returning a book—when her liver-spotted fingers could brush against Mahsa’s damp, soft skin. A motherly affection? Even she doubted it herself.

Her gaze slipped from the glass to Mansour’s empty rocking chair in the corner of the room. It still reeked of sickness. The Mansour of those final months bore no resemblance to the pristine twenty-two-year-old in the framed photo on the sideboard—the boy in the plaid suit and slicked-back hair, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, glaring at the camera like he owned the world. Illness had hollowed him out like termites. His withered brain had scrubbed away forty-two years of memories, leaving only a single word festering in the blank space: thief. On the nights he clawed at the mattress, wailing, Who are you?!—the old woman had silently prayed for his death. More than once, her hands had hovered over a pillow. Now, Mansour had been resting beneath the earth for a month, yet those midnight wishes still weighed on her like a stain. She had loved him, anyway. Or maybe she had just gotten used to him. To his nagging. To the bickering. The silence of these nights was far more horrifying than his screams, his shitting, his pissing. A silence that not even the radio could pierce through.

The sole beautiful remnant of her past life was Misha, now rubbing himself against her shin. She bent down, scooped up the frail body, and sank into the sofa. Under her fingertips, the cat’s spine jutted out like the teeth of a wooden comb. She let him drop. He retreated to the corner of the sofa, fixing her with large, glassy blue eyes. The woman picked up the book Mahsa had lent her that afternoon: The Rooftop. It was a thin volume, but her eyesight was failing, and she no longer had the stamina to read for hours. Besides, she didn’t really need to. Whenever Mahsa asked for her thoughts, the old woman would simply nod along, cleverly weaving her opinions from the scraps of the girl’s own excited rambling. Mahsa never noticed the echo; she spoke of those plots with such breathless heat, you’d think she had birthed them herself.

The pages carried the faint trace of Mahsa’s imported perfume, laced with the smoke of slim cigarettes. The old woman inhaled it ravenously. The scent dragged itself deep into her corroded lungs, pooling beneath her ribcage like a viscous liquid. All this time, Apt. 4 had been her secret sanctuary. Every time she crossed that threshold, she felt a sudden rush of stolen vitality.

But recently, the routine broke. She had been standing by the stove, right next to the air vent that usually only channelled the muffled bass of Mahsa’s music or the clatter of dishes. That night, however, a laugh seeped through the grate. Not one of Mahsa’s usual, clipped giggles; it was a drawn-out, pleasure-soaked laugh. Then came the hushed whispers of a phone call. The old woman couldn’t make out the words, but Mahsa’s intimate cadence laid bare the gravity of whoever was breathing on the other end of the line.

*

That afternoon, she baked a carrot cake, picked up the book, and went to Mahsa’s. The girl poured a cup of chamomile tea and sat across from her, but her mind was drifting, her eyes fixed on the telephone. Amid the scattered, everyday chatter, she dropped it—casually, like mentioning a shift in the weather:

“I might not renew the lease this year…”

The words poured into the old woman’s ears like molten lead. Mahsa was leaving. She was going to move in with that guy. She was going to strip Apt. 4 bare, abandoning the old woman to a silence she could no longer endure.

“Why? You loved this neighbourhood. You said you were hoping to work things out with the landlord.”

Mahsa shrugged.

“I don’t know. Rent has skyrocketed, and my new workplace is too far from here.”

Why didn’t she say a single word about her? Hadn’t she always said, You’re like a mother to me? Hadn’t she said how lucky she was to have a neighbour who still cared, despite having a sick husband? The old woman couldn’t believe this was the same Mahsa who had taken time off work just to drive them to the hospital, who had stood like a barricade to pacify the neighbours when Mansour’s screams tore through the night. What had that man done to her that made all that devotion drain away completely?

She made a sudden excuse about needing an early walk. She stood up and left, without even taking a new book.

But there was no walk. Nadereh and Monir had called a few times—wheezing, idle old women who only wanted to drag her out into the streets. She let it ring. Let them think she was staying at her sister’s. Let them forget entirely that a forsaken woman still drew breath in this building. Her sister had been dead for ten years, and the grave felt like a far better place than this reeking flat. She locked herself inside her dim apartment. Behind the heavy drapes, behind that wall. Awaiting the catastrophe.

Two days later, during the most drawn-out weekend of her life, the dead weight of a stranger’s boots finally shuddered up the staircase. The woman’s stomach plummeted. She eased her door open, slipping into the gloom of the hallway like a shadow, and pressed her ear flush against the wood of Apt. 4. Through the crack, the sounds sharpened. Mahsa’s voice—laughing and pliant—followed by the man’s low murmurs. He whispered something, and a sudden gunshot of dizzy, drunken laughter ricocheted through the hall. The old woman squeezed her eyes shut. In the blackness behind her lids, the images viciously sprang to life: she saw Mahsa in that pleated skirt with her hair down; saw the man’s broad, meaty hands sliding over her flushed skin; the kisses, the tremor of their bodies in the dark, the moans. Her knees liquefied. A feverish heat seized her, cold sweat beading at her temples and dripping down her wrinkled neck. The hallway had run out of air. In that trance of physical jealousy, time slipped away. When she snapped back, the chill of the corridor was biting her skin. She spun around. Her own front door stood gaping open.

Why was it open? Hadn’t she pulled it tight? She stepped into the living room, the crushing weight of the apartment collapsing onto her more heavily than ever. “Misha?” Her voice rasped in her throat. Whenever she returned from Apt. 4, the cat would rub against her legs so frantically, as if trying to scrape the stench of that flat from his owner’s flesh. She went to the sofa. His usual corner was empty. She ran a hand over the coarse upholstery; no familiar warmth, no trace of his white body. She checked beneath Mansour’s rocking chair, behind the drapes, under the bed, inside the kitchen cabinets. The cat’s bowl was full. Untouched. The ticking of the wall clock hammered against her skull.

She stepped back out to the landing, her breath thinning. The stairwell stretched below her, a silent, yawning throat. She lifted a hand, desperate to hammer against the wood of Apt. 4, to plead with Mahsa for help, but her fist froze in mid-air. What if she didn’t answer? Or what if the door opened late, revealing Mahsa with tangled hair, swallowed in an unbuttoned men’s shirt, her bare legs exposed? The thought of that heavy, sweat-slicked shadow hovering right behind her naked shoulder curdled in her stomach. Witnessing that scene would be more terrifying than her own death.

Fleeing the hallway, she hurried down the stairs as fast as her legs would allow, stumbling into the middle of the courtyard. The bite of the night settled on her skin. She circled the yard, peering behind the shrubs. “Misha… Misha…” Her voice cracked, fading into a frail whimper smothered by the brick walls. She pulled open the iron gate and stepped into the alleyway. The wind made the streetlamp flicker, throwing warped shadows of the trees onto the uneven asphalt. The alley was empty all the way to the end. No sound of meowing, no blue eyes gleaming in the dark. There was no trace of him. As if he had never existed. He had never been good with people; he would always sprint and hide when anyone came over. Only Mansour and Mahsa had ever laid eyes on him. How could she even prove he was real? Mansour was dead. Mahsa was wrapped in her lover’s arms.

Until dawn broke, she dragged herself down those stairs three more times. In plastic slippers, on throbbing legs. Pacing up and down that alley, and the next, and the next. Every time a trash bag rustled, she froze and called out his name. But there was only the wind and the silence. The thought of where the defenceless creature was cowering, how starving he must be, who would give him his heart drops,  or the image of his soft body crushed beneath heavy tires and left mangled on the asphalt—it strangled the breath right out of her. When she returned to the flat for the final time, the sun was already bruising the sky. She pulled the door shut. Threw the deadbolt. She didn’t go back out.

For three whole days, she entombed herself in the apartment. Her ancient legs and failing eyes had no strength left to scour the streets. The suffocating despair of Misha’s disappearance settled in her veins like poison, and the terror that this strange man would snatch away her sole remaining joy pushed her to the brink. For hours, she stood behind the door, her eye welded to the peephole. Through that tiny glass, the outside world was swollen and deformed, the staircase taking on a macabre curve. She stalked Mahsa coming and going. On the evening of the second day, the man’s warped silhouette slithered into the frame as well. Through that concave lens, as they embraced, they collapsed into a single, fleshy, entwined mass. She held her breath, digging her nails into the wood so savagely her knuckles turned bone-white. She wanted to rip the door open, grab the girl by the collar, tear her from the man’s arms, and drag her into her own home. Instead, she backed away and, on buckling knees, let the living room swallow her whole.

*

The boundary between waking and sleeping eroded. Whenever she shut her eyes from sheer exhaustion, the nightmares latched onto her brain like swollen leeches. She would see Mansour, naked and gaunt, rocking in his chair, cradling Misha against his chest. But when the cat turned its head, it wore Mahsa’s face. With languid eyes and half-parted lips, it panted, rasping in Mansour’s voice: “Thief… thief…” Then, the stranger’s hands would surge out of the dark, hooking past the nape of Mansour’s neck to claw at the cat’s body, squeezing so violently that the creature’s bones snapped beneath his fingers with a sickening crunch. Mahsa’s shrieks of laughter would rip through the room. The woman would gasp awake, her mouth parched.

The morning of the fourth day. It was as if the storm had broken. The old woman got up. She wiped the bathroom mirror with a wet palm; her reflection stared back, blurred and fading. With trembling fingers, she tried to pin her white, matted hair behind her ears. She had to stop Mahsa. She had to keep a piece of her, something more tangible than these grotesque nightmares.

In the kitchen, she let the tap run until the water was a stinging heat, holding her hands beneath the flow until her fingertips scalded raw and numb. The familiar rhythm of the knife on the cutting board steadied her—dicing the onions, searing the meat, tossing the green beans into the skillet until the heat coaxed out the rich, earthen scent of cinnamon and saffron. Mahsa had always loved that smell.

Leaving the rice to drain, she went straight for Mansour’s medicine cabinet. The sedatives in their aluminium blister packs. The ones the doctor had prescribed for his midnight terrors, which he hadn’t been able to swallow in those final days when his mind was sinking into oblivion. She popped ten, maybe fifteen of the chalky tablets into the heavy brass mortar. The pestle came down. Crack… crack… crack… With every strike, she ground it all down: the echo of that drunken laughter from the hallway, the aching void of Misha’s empty corner, the endless loop of Mansour’s howling. She ground it all into a fine, white dust.

She carried the bowl back to the stove. The skillet hissed over a low flame, a rim of dark red oil bubbling up around the chunks of meat. Taking a breath, she tilted the bowl and watched the powder spill into the simmering pan. It frothed white for a few seconds before dissolving seamlessly into the scarlet sludge. A stir of the wooden spoon, a pinch of extra spice, and the medicine vanished. Invisible. She began spooning the hot mixture over the rice, layer by layer, before securing the lid to let it steam. Just a deep sleep. A sleep that would keep Mahsa in Apt. 4 forever, never to wake in a stranger’s arms. When the food was ready, she ladled it onto a platter, garnished it with a few dried damask roses, and stepped out of the flat.

She stood before the door of Apt. 4, her skin slick with a cold sweat. Her hands trembled, the heat of the platter scorching her stomach through her clothes. A wave of vertigo hit her. What if she opened the door and the man was right there? What if Mahsa said she had already eaten? She wanted to turn back, but her gaze snagged on the savory steam rising from the Loobia Polo. The aroma intoxicated her. Her mouth watered. She longed for them to sit together at that little table for two, to heap their plates and eat until they scraped the bottom of the dish. To eat until the sedatives did their work, until both of them, side by side, in the middle of that living room smelling of Mahsa’s perfume, would sink into a sleep where no Mansour ever dies in agony, no man ever pulls Mahsa into his arms, no woman ever leaves a door gaping open, and no cat ever goes missing.

She clutched the platter tighter against her stomach. Bowing her head so Mahsa wouldn’t see tears welling in her eyes, she pressed the bell.