“If you aren’t at that window next Thursday, I’m breaking the glass,” Andre said, his voice cracking as he stood by my hospital bed. He was looking down at his worn-out sneakers, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

My daughter Karen stood near the door, her eyes glued to her phone, sighing loudly as if his presence was an inconvenience.

I need to back up for a second. I know how this sounds. An old woman, a college-age delivery boy, and a family that cannot be bothered. But you have to understand how I ended up on that floor in the first place.

I am sixty-seven years old. I live in a small, drafty house in West Allis, Wisconsin.

It is the kind of house where the kitchen floor still has the yellow linoleum from 1984, complete with the burn mark near the stove where my late husband, Arthur, dropped a hot pan of fudge. Arthur died four years ago. After he passed, the silence in this house became a physical weight.

My daughter, Karen, lives exactly three miles away. She lives in a beautiful suburban colonial with a three-car garage and a paved driveway. She has two kids who play travel soccer.

I know this because I see her Facebook posts. I do not see her in person. The last time she walked through my front door was seven months ago, on Easter. She stayed for twenty minutes, left a plastic container of store-bought potato salad, and said she had to run because the kids had a practice.

So, I learned to live with the silence. I stopped driving because my knees started giving out, which meant my groceries had to be delivered. That is how I met Andre. He works for the local supermarket delivery service. He is nineteen, maybe twenty, with messy brown hair and a permanent smell of laundry detergent and cheap body spray.

Every Thursday morning at exactly nine o’clock, the blue delivery van would rumble down my street. It was a rusty old thing that squeaked when it hit the pothole near my driveway. I started timing my morning coffee to that squeak. I would stand by the kitchen window, holding my red-lidded plastic tub of instant coffee, waiting.

Andre would walk up the steps, place the bags on the wooden bench, and knock twice. Then he would turn, walk back to his van, and wave at me through the glass. I would wave back. That was our routine. It was the only time during the week that another human being acknowledged I was still breathing. I never opened the door to talk to him because I was embarrassed by my walker. I did not want him to see me struggling.

But three weeks ago, on a Wednesday night, everything went dark.