But it was true. Dad had used his old iPhone to snap pictures. We scrolled through the storehouse of megapixel selfies of him and Mom, the two of them posing like people did back at the start of the millennium. There were a few inexplicable portraits of them taken at such a far distance that there was no way it’d been a selfie stick.

“How’d you even get a shot like this?” Nin asked.

“We asked someone to take it.”

I shrugged. “I guess people were more trusting back then.”

Nostalgia was going to be a lot harder to use. There were drop-boxes to upload Dad’s old pics to, user agreements, and clickable acknowledgments of less-than-perfect verisimilitude. It’d take twenty-four hours, which seemed forever, but it would be possible to re-create Mom from the photos.

To pass the time, Nin and I did the yard work that’d been neglected. We raked leaves in the autumn light, the trees an explosion of yellows and reds all around us. I tried to find a way to break the silence, but Nin was watching videos in her eyes and listening to music. She created small piles in the expanse of our backyard, then paused and stood there with her shoulders slumped. I went over and put my hand on her back.

“You okay?”

She closed her eyes. “Are you going to let her into your feed, too?”

I hadn’t thought about it. “I guess I’ll have to, right? Just to make sure it looks like Mom?”

“I think we both have to,” she said. “That’s going to be weird.”

I pictured Mom again, her joy when we’d come home for the holidays. I didn’t know how I’d respond to seeing her. Nin looked like she was about to cry, and I wanted to give her a hug, but she took her rake and walked across the yard to start on a corner we hadn’t done yet, leaving us both to cope with our grief alone.

Mom returned to us on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Dad, Nin, and I sat on the couch together, put in our contacts and logged on, and suddenly there she was, standing before us on the wooden floor.

“Leah,” she said. “How are you, honey? Come give me a hug.”

I looked to Nin. “I guess do it?” she said.

So I crossed the room and Mom leaned toward me, putting her holographic arms around me as though she were real. Then she called Nin up for a hug, and finally she sat down on the couch next to Dad. “Isn’t it good to have the girls home, Lou!”

Our father didn’t say anything, just looked at her, but his eyes were smiling.