My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

Then she laid them out.

There were, I found out later, three hundred and forty-one photographs in that lunchbox.

Almost all of them were Milo and Birdie.

Milo sitting on the curb next to her stroller with a drawing pad. Milo holding a fistful of dandelions with the dirt hanging off. Milo with a plastic mixing bowl on his head and Birdie in Rhonda's arms with her whole face open, mid-shriek. Milo walking backwards up the sidewalk making a face. Milo in a rain poncho holding an umbrella over a stroller in October.

Two years of it. Dated on the back in pencil, in shaky block capitals.

Every single one taken from the same angle, from up high, at a distance of maybe sixty yards.

The second-floor window of the corner house at the end of Bellamy Row.

Officer Kell said, "Do you know the man who lives at 1174?"

I said I didn't, and that is a sentence I have had to live with.