Let me tell you something about eleven years.

Eleven years is long enough to know which step on the third floor landing creaks in winter and which doesn’t. It’s long enough to know that the couple in 2A argues every Sunday morning and then laughs about it by afternoon, that the woman in 1C gets a grocery delivery every Thursday at half past ten, that the man in 5B practices what sounds like a recorder but might be a flute, badly, at intervals that suggest he has not improved in the time you’ve known him.

Eleven years is long enough to become part of a building’s rhythm. To be the kind of neighbor people trust with their spare keys and their package deliveries and the knowledge of where the maintenance request forms are kept, because you’ve lived there long enough to know and you’ve always been the kind of person who pays attention.

I am that person.

Margaret Collier, apartment 3B, eleven years in residence, the one who knows where the forms are.

I signed for his packages all last winter. All of them — the ones that arrived on cold Tuesday mornings when I was already running late and had to rearrange my entire entry hall to stack them somewhere logical so they’d be safe until he collected them. I watched Mrs. Okafor’s cat in 2C for ten days last spring when she went to visit her daughter, including the day the cat knocked a full vase of water onto my laptop and looked absolutely unrepentant about it. I have been the woman in 3B who is reliable and reasonable and who has never, in eleven years, been the source of a noise complaint, a dispute, or any reason for the building management to learn my name in a context other than rent.

“The lesson,” I said, “is that being the woman who doesn’t complain doesn’t mean being the woman who accepts anything. There’s a version of reasonable that knows exactly what it will and won’t absorb. I am that version.”

I poured my tea.

“And keep your lease somewhere you can find it,” I said. “You never know when you’ll need to know what it says.”