Despite this wishful thinking, resentment constituted much of my reaction to the news. Roger’s progressively incoherent emails and the assertive, bitchy-feeling replies they warranted from me highlighted how siloed our lives were. I knew him well—maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else. But I didn’t have his health history. I had his ATM card, but I didn’t have his home address. I couldn’t have arranged a doctor’s appointment for him no matter how badly he needed one. I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family. No one would recognize that I meant something to him excepting, maybe, the doorman at his condo building in DC.