“That’s never going to happen,” I said, brushing past him. “I prefer to rely on you to catch me with your shoulders or lap.” I hooked my thumb toward the street corner. “I’m meeting my family at dad’s diner. Do you want me to pick you up anything to eat?”

He shook his head, then glanced back toward Eddie’s house. “If there’s any extra…”

I touched his arm. “I got it. And it’s no problem.”

“Thank you,” he said.

I paused, mid-step, in front of the lot. There was significantly less trash in the small quadrant Dean and I had worked through yesterday. “Whoa,” I said. “It’s already looking way better. Who showed up after I left?”

The hint of pride in his face gave me for real butterflies. “Natalia and Martín. My parents, who brought along a few of their friends from church just to help. And Rowan’s nonprofit arranged getting a dumpster for us in a couple days so we can get most of it cleared out.”

I chewed on my lip, feeling almost absurdly intrigued. My editorial instincts were clamoring for attention now, even if I didn’t want to give in.

I did allow my brain to frame out a few shots and piece together a tiny arc of narrative. The transformation here was primed to be dramatic. And this street was a mixture of everything South Philly represented—tough older folks and nosy gossips and younger families and new immigrants. A blend of language and food, cultures and traditions, all jammed into brick row homes and front stoops.

“You know what…wait here a sec. Do you mind holding these?” I shoved the photo albums into his very capable arms, raced inside, and snatched my camera from the dining room table.

When I returned, I snapped a few shots of the lot from a couple angles and checked their quality on the digital screen. “We should have evidence of what the space was before. It’ll really blow people’s minds when they see what we do with it.”

His brow lifted. “What are we going to do with it?”

“We’ll figure it out, don’t you worry,” I said. “But I didn’t want this historical moment to go undocumented.”

He gave a pointed look at my camera. “Have you ever worked on any film projects about Philly?”

As a rule, I did not. Filming was intimate work. It was much harder to hide the truth. It was much easier to expose every sneaky vulnerability or complicated family secret.

“I haven’t, and I don’t have an interest in doing so. Part of the appeal of freelancing is that I get to see so many new and different places,” I said, lifting the strap over my head. “But I can take a few photos here or there while we’re working together on it.”