“Let it go,” I said aloud as I emerged from her bedroom on my way downstairs to the study to get to work.

From the basement, she called to me. Her voice, coming from behind a door, was muffled. “Dad! Come down for a sec!”

In the brochure, Valley Forest Estates had called it a “wine cellar” or “cold room,” a place to keep fresh vegetables or store fine bottles of white and red. The room was no more than five by seven feet in size, and we had turned it into a darkroom.

“Hang on,” she said, making sure her film was safe from any invading light, then opened the door to admit me into the blackness. My eyes adjusted to the soft red light, the smell of developing fluid swirling up my nostrils. I was brought in occasionally as a technical adviser, having spent a lot of time in a darkroom when I worked in newspapers, but this time Angie just wanted me to see what she was doing.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said, moving the white paper back and forth in the solution. Gradually, images began to take shape. “I love this part,” Angie said. “It’s like watching something being born. A lot of the kids, they’ve got these digital cameras, they do everything on the screen. It’s kind of cool, but there’s no suspense, you know? This way, half the fun is in the anticipation.”

A street sign came into view. “Chancery Park.” Then houses.

“It’s our neighborhood,” I said. “You took some pictures of the street. Isn’t that nice.”

But as each shot materialized, it became clear that Angie was up to much more than that. The pictures, all black-and-white, had a starkness about them.

“There are no people,” I said. “The streets are empty.”

“Yeah,” said Angie. “I captured them just the way they are. And see how the trees look like twigs, and in this shot, I’ve lined up the houses so you can see how they’re all exactly the same.”

“Very effective,” I said.

“I’m calling it ‘Dying in Suburbia: A Study in Redundancy.’”

“It’s good,” I said quietly. “It’s very good.”

Angie was still on the same theme as I drove her to school later, since she’d missed the bus. She said, “How much longer are we going to live out here?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much longer? We’ve been out here, like, almost two years and when are we going to move back into the city? Would we be able to buy back the house on Crandall? It wouldn’t have to be that house, although it would be nice, unless the new owners are, like, a bunch of psycho goths who’ve ripped out the walls and painted the ceilings black or something.”

“Where did you get the idea we were moving back into the city?”