His eyes always looked sad, watching these changes across his model city. He’d said it was important to understand why the city was changing. “This is a valuable place. This is a valuable, fertile, hydrated, well-positioned borderland. Manmade displacement is never random, Dunny. Natural displacement? Sure, maybe. Hurricanes, tornadoes—even that, we don’t really know, maybe there is a plan there too. But men always go towards something we want. Someone wants this corner. Who?”

Dune had been a young skeptic, not seeing why both of her parents were so obsessed with Detroit. Everything was falling apart, everyone was leaving—all she and her classmates talked about was where else they were going to go. She dreamed of living in a real city, a growing city. Detroit was not a destination.

Dune walked up to the model. It had been ignored for years, and those years had left the toy city dusty, the table wheels piled with the light fuzz of time, of not being moved.

There was a clear path to the laundry. Dune admired the tender discipline of her mother, coming into this place of her beloved, for years, not moving a thing.

Dune let herself get close to the model, the four tables covered in little plastic trees, patches of green felt for open space, small buildings gathered from board games, trinket stores, her own abandoned toy collections. It was always summer on the model.

Standing north of the city, the stairs behind her, she could look down Woodward all the way to the blue silk scarf that was, on this model, Detroit River, the city’s southern border, a major barge thruway. She moved around in a circle, walking down the eastern edge of the model, beyond which Ohio was implied. Then she was standing in the river, Canada at her back in the one place where it was south of a US city. The tall GM/RenCen buildings were at her waist, the Greektown casino near her right hand. Opposite her, beyond the North End, waited the wooden stairs up to the open basement door and her mother’s world.

This was her father’s realm.

Brendon had done an amazing job of recreating the city. Downtown was built to scale, Dune recognized the massive L shape of Cobo Hall, the Westin a few inches north, the People Mover frozen on its useless circuit. There was a switch somewhere that was supposed to turn it on, but she couldn’t remember if Brendon had ever gotten it to successfully chug its loop.

Her prescient father had argued on behalf of real public transportation. It had come, imperfectly, in the form of a light rail a couple of years after his death. It was supposed to expand to the west and east this year, actually reach neighborhoods beyond the gentrification zone. She wanted to tell him.