That was the first thing that struck me as wrong. It was just the bare glass jar sitting on the frozen mat. I picked it up quickly, afraid the cold would crack the glass, and that’s when I felt the paper.

Taped securely to the underside of the jar was a folded note.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I carried the jar to the kitchen counter, set it down, and carefully peeled the tape away. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely unfold the paper. It was written in the bubbly, youthful handwriting of the third person.

The note read: ‘Mrs. Porter, we thought you should finally know there have been three of us. We wanted to tell you sooner, but it was too hard. The recipe has always been the same, but the hands making it had to change.’ I swallowed hard, my eyes scanning down the page.

‘My name is Maya,’ the letter continued. ‘I am seventeen years old. For the last year, I’ve been making your soup. Before me, it was my dad, David. He made it for two years, writing the labels in his messy block letters.’ I leaned against the counter, my legs suddenly feeling weak.

Why would a man named David and a teenager named Maya spend years feeding me? I forced my eyes to the final paragraph. ‘But dad and I were just keeping a promise. The person who started this, the beautiful cursive you saw for the first two years, was my mother.

She made us promise to never let you miss a Monday after your husband died. She wanted to do it herself forever, but she got sick. Dad took over when she went into hospice. I took over when Dad got transferred to the night shift last year.

We kept the promise, Mrs. Porter. We kept it for her.’ Tears were streaming down my face, blurring the ink on the page. I wiped my eyes frantically to read the last line. ‘My mother’s name was Clara. She never stopped thinking about you. She loved you very much, Grandma.’ The paper slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the kitchen floor.

A sob ripped out of my throat, loud and raw in the empty house. Clara. My daughter. Clara and I had a falling out almost a decade ago. It was a stupid, bitter argument over her choice in a husband—David—a man Arthur and I wrongly believed wasn’t good enough for her.