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Robert's old work friend's wife has been emailing me trip tips since he died. Seven years of color-coded packing lists. I've never asked for one. Linda Coleman is sixty-one. Her husband Hal worked with Robert at the engineering firm for nineteen years before Robert left to start his consultancy. They were old work friends. Beers after the Tuesday meetings. Christmas cards every December. We had dinner with them maybe twice a year. Linda and I were friends because our husbands were friends. We had three or four shared meals a year. We liked each other in the way you like the wife of your husband's old colleague. We did not call each other. Then Robert died. For the first six months, Linda was kind. She came to the funeral. She sent a casserole. She called once. Then she started sending the trip emails. The first one was March of the first year — six months after Robert. I was going to a writing retreat in New Mexico with Helen and two other women. I had mentioned it once at a dinner with the Colemans the previous Christmas, in passing, before Robert got sick. Linda's email had the subject line: *Sarah! Some tips for New Mexico!* It was a color-coded PDF. Five pages. Packing list (green). Hotel tips (blue). Restaurant recommendations (orange). Things to watch out for as a solo female traveler (red). Resources in case of emergency (purple). She had been to New Mexico once, in 2003, with Hal. I had been to New Mexico three times before Robert got sick. Twice with Robert. Once with Helen, before any of us were married, in 1988. I read the PDF. I thanked her by email. I did not use any of it. The next year, the emails started arriving before any trip I'd mentioned within earshot of Hal. Hal would mention me at the firm. Linda would Google the destination. The PDF would arrive a week later. By year three, I had a folder in my inbox called *Linda*. There were eleven PDFs in it. By year five, sixteen. I had never deleted any of them. I had also never replied with anything beyond a polite thank-you. She had been writing me trip PDFs for seven years. This March I started planning a solo trip to Lisbon. Five days. A trip Robert and I had talked about for fifteen years. He had wanted to go for the food. I had wanted to go for the tiles. I mentioned it to Hal at the funeral of another old colleague in February. The PDF arrived three days later. Subject line: *Sarah! Lisbon tips!* Six pages this time. The largest yet. I opened it. Page one: packing list (green). Forty-two items. Page two: hotel tips (blue). She had picked three hotels for me, with notes on which one would be safest for a woman traveling alone. Page three: restaurant recommendations (orange). She had starred the ones that took reservations because, she had written, *some restaurants in Lisbon don't take walk-ins after 8 PM and it can be awkward to dine alone late.* Page four: solo female traveler tips (red). Six bullet points about the metro. Three about taxis. Four about hotel front desks. Two about pickpockets in Alfama. One about not walking back to the hotel after dark. Page five: a list of friends she had who had been to Lisbon. With phone numbers. *In case anything comes up and you need someone to talk to.* Page six: medical resources. Closest English-speaking hospital. A list of pharmacies. A note about which embassy line to call. It was thoughtful. It was thorough. It was wrong about almost everything because she had not asked me anything. I had been to Lisbon in 1996 with Robert. I had been to Porto two years ago with Helen. I speak conversational Portuguese — I had taken it for three years in night school in 2014 because Robert kept saying we should go back to Portugal and I wanted to be ready. I had walked Alfama at night by myself in 2023 on the way back from a fado bar. Linda did not know any of this. Linda had been writing me PDFs about destinations I knew better than she did, for seven years, based on what Hal had heard me say in passing at firm dinners. I read the PDF twice. Then I called Helen. Helen, the Camino walker. I read her the PDF. She was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Sarah. Linda Coleman has been writing you these PDFs for seven years." "Yes." "And you have been letting her." "I have been thanking her by email." "That's the same thing." I waited. "Sarah. Why does Linda Coleman think you don't know Lisbon." "Because she has never asked me." "And why has she never asked you." I sat with that for a moment. "Because she has been making the PDFs since the year Robert died, when I might actually have needed them. And she has not updated the file on me since." "There it is." She was quiet. "What do I do." "You don't write her back this time. You go to Lisbon. You come home. You send her a single email with one sentence and one attachment." "What sentence." "You decide." "And what attachment." "A photograph. Of you at the place she warned you not to go to." I thought about it. "Helen." "Yes." "What shoes do I bring." "The cream and the apricot. The cream is for the day. The apricot is for the fado bars. You walked Alfama at night in apricot two years ago. You're going to do it again. They had something running where you grab two pairs and the second one's free. I picked up the lavender and the multicolor last month — they have a thing going where the cream and the apricot keep selling out first because they look like dress shoes." I already had both. I ordered a third pair of the cream as a gift for Wendy from Sydney — the woman from the Napa inn — who'd asked me to send her one if I saw a restock. The cream was on backorder by Tuesday. I flew to Lisbon on a Saturday. The first night I had dinner at a restaurant in Alfama that didn't take reservations after eight. I walked in at nine. I sat at the bar. I had the bacalhau à brás and a glass of Vinho Verde. The waiter — a man in his sixties named Ruben who had been at the restaurant for forty years — recognized me from my last trip. "Senhora Sarah. Your husband." "He died." He put his hand on mine for a second. Then he said something in Portuguese I'd had to look up later. *The good ones always do.* He poured me a second Vinho Verde. I walked back to the hotel at midnight. Through Alfama. In the apricot Cloud Walks. The cobblestones were cobblestones. The streets were lit. There was a fado coming out of a doorway on Rua de São Pedro and I stopped for ten minutes to listen. I took a photograph from outside the doorway. The next four days I did the tile museum, the LX Factory, the day trip to Sintra, a long lunch at a place in Campo de Ourique that Linda had not put on her PDF, two more nights in Alfama, and a sunset at a small belvedere above the river that Robert and I had found in 1996 and that I had not been back to since. I came home Friday. I wrote Linda an email on Saturday morning. The email had one sentence and one attachment. *Linda — Thank you for the PDFs over the years. The attached is from Tuesday night, walking back from a fado bar in Alfama, in the shoes I'd like to recommend to you.* I attached the photograph from outside the doorway. I had asked a young woman passing by to take it. I am in the apricot Cloud Walks, in the wrap dress, holding a small ceramic tile I had bought that afternoon. It is eleven thirty at night. I am smiling. She wrote back at noon. *Sarah. I have been writing the wrong thing for seven years. I'm sorry. What are the shoes.* I told her. She replied within the hour. *Ordered. Cream and apricot. The cream was almost gone. Thank you for telling me. And for the photograph. I will not send another PDF.* She sent another one in October. About Marrakesh. I had not mentioned Marrakesh anywhere. This one was different. It was one page. It said: *Sarah. Hal mentioned you might be thinking about Marrakesh in the spring. I am not going to send you a PDF this time. I am going to ask: have you been? And if so, where would you go for dinner? And what shoes would you wear? — Linda* I wrote her back a four-line email with two restaurants and a photograph of the apricot Cloud Walks on a low wooden table at a riad in Marrakesh from 2018. She wrote back: *Ah. Of course. Sorry I asked. The shoes are doing the work.* I sent her a laughing emoji. It was the first time she had laughed at herself in seven years of trip PDFs. Here's what I learned. For seven years Linda Coleman had been writing me PDFs that were really about Linda Coleman. She had not been writing them to help me travel. She had been writing them to take care of the part of herself that needed to take care of the widow her husband's old colleague's wife had become. The widow was Linda's project. The PDFs were the deliverables. I had been accepting the deliverables because correcting her felt unkind. The shoes didn't change Linda. The shoes changed what Linda could see of me. And once she could see, she stopped writing the PDFs. If a friend has been writing you trip PDFs you never asked for — If she has been color-coding her concern for years — If you have been thanking her instead of correcting her because correcting her felt like rejecting her — Look at the shoe before you accept the next attachment. Not because it solves everything. Linda is still going to want to take care of widows. The Coleman dinners are still going to be slightly awkward. Hal is still going to mention me at the firm. But because the moment you send one photograph that contains the right information — that's the moment Linda has to write a different kind of PDF. Helen has the lavender and the multicolor. Wendy from Sydney has the third pair of the cream I ordered for her. Linda has the cream and the apricot now. Marian from the wine club has the apricot. A few colors were already low when I checked back this week. I'd move sooner rather than later if there's one you want. The folder in my inbox called *Linda* has sixteen PDFs. I have not deleted them. I am keeping them as a record of what seven years of well-meaning information looks like when no one stops to ask. The seventeenth PDF, from October, is a single page. I'm keeping that one too. Your move.