“She didn’t tell me,” Max said flatly. “When it comes to Carey, we’re all supposed to go along with whatever.” Anger radiated from her, echoing against the cold walls that surrounded us, and I didn’t dare press any further. By the time we got to her darkroom, the feeling had disappeared, and Max was all smiles once again. She punched a code into the door to unlock it.

“Eighteen thirty-nine?” I asked.

“The year that commercial photography became available to the masses,” she said, the door clicking open. “There are so many people who come through this house for Charlie’s business that I’d rather they didn’t mess around in here.”

She walked me slowly around the darkroom, a thousand-square-foot studio with a wall of purple-tinted windows, blocking out the UV. A framed black-and-white portrait of her as a teenager by Ellen von Unwerth hung on one wall. She started animatedly describing the works in process that hung from clips around the room and the differences between the vintage film stocks she was using, but I barely listened; I was thinking about Carey. It was impossible not to, in this house that reeked of the essence of her work—work that defined the place where life met death, where cold and hard met soft and yielding—despite the firm architecture Charlie had commissioned to contain it, or the décor Max had chosen to try to erase her. Max rifled through a flat file, wine still in hand, while I stared at the cement wall.

“Look, here’s the one of you.” Max was holding up a photo. I snapped to attention.

The picture was of me at sixteen years old, wearing a too-tight thrift-store halter dress and standing underneath the metal halo of an inner-city basketball hoop, its net long gone, deflated basketball in my hands, taken during her first and only visit to Gainesville. Max had surprised me by flying in for the weekend, so she could tell me all about filming her first movie.

It was a complete disaster. My mother was particularly awful, trying the first night to get Max to go with her to the bar (without me), then eventually coming home so drunk that she passed out parked halfway inside the garage.