Photography has taught me how to wait. It has also taught me how to focus on that single subject and ignore everything else. This doesn’t come naturally to me. As the middle of three children, I was born with peripheral vision—as in, an acute awareness of my sisters above and below, my parents, our home and friends, and my precarious place in it all. Limiting myself to one scene at a time, as my camera does, has been huge.

The fog thickens on the street below. I wait until diffused headlights and taillights reappear, wait again when I hear a siren, then follow the blue strobe through the shift of vehicles. When I’m content, I turn north, wait for the best mix of fog, steel towers, and double-tiered lights, then shoot again.

“What’s the bridge doing?” Joy asks from the far end of the sofa, and I smile. She would know what the Nikon and I see. We’re connected that way, my thirteen-year-old daughter and I. And this is a game we often play.

“Floating. I can’t see its legs.” Leaving the bridge, I find her reflection in the glass. With the rest of the lights off, her tiny book light is little more than a faint glow on the pink baby dolls that were her new favorites from the vintage store in the Village. But that glow isn’t as warm as it would have been reflecting off paper.

Suspicious, I slide in beside her, angled to see her book. She starts to close it, makes a small sound, and stops. She knows that I’ve already seen what she was trying to hide, that her book light is clamped to the edge of Great Expectations but that tucked inside the bigger book is her Kindle. Close up now, I see page forty-four of Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain.

“But, but, but,” I stutter, tipping my face up to see her, “this was on our us reading list. We were supposed to read it together.” Read it aloud, actually. When Joy was little, I always read aloud with her tucked up close, and somehow I just never stopped. The books have changed, and the older she gets, the more challenged I am to make my voice fit different characters. I’d been looking forward to being a dog.

“Well, I couldn’t not read the first page, and then I had to read the second,” she reasons. “Isn’t that what you always say, that if you want to keep reading, it’s the sign of a good book? Olivia Mattson says this one’s dumb, like who wants to know what a dog thinks, but I’m not sure how she knows anything about it, because her totally self-absorbed mother doesn’t read—”

“Joy.”