To a stranger’s knock, a boy of about 9 opens the door of 1022 Woodycrest Avenue, the Bronx. He listens for a moment, then circles back to summon his mother, Manthia Magassa. The warming fragrance of a stew has drifted from the kitchen, then streams in to the cold doorway. An electronic chirp sounds from the wooden stairwell. The boy watches television.

Ms. Magassa appears.

Had she heard about the fire in the Bronx?

“What?” she replied. “Come inside. It’s too cold to stand here.”

She had not yet heard about Thursday’s news, of 12 people dead and others critically injured in an apartment house fire on Prospect Avenue. That was three miles from Woodycrest. Ms. Magassa’s own home, now disguised by its brick facade, its swinging gate at the front steps, its ordinariness among the tidy homes and small apartment houses on Woodycrest, is a landmark to such deaths. On March 8, 2007, 10 people died in a fire at 1022 Woodycrest, nine of them children, all immigrants from Mali in West Africa. Five of the children were from the Magassa family.

Time has a way of closing over such events; from the street, there is no physical sign of ruin; the Magassas rebuilt the charred interior. “We came back in 2009,” Ms. Magassa said.