The file arrived three days later.
It was a manila envelope with a handwritten address and a return label from Peter Halloran, and it was thick, and when I opened it on the studio desk, the first thing that fell out was a photograph of my mother.
She was standing at the fence with a tape measure in her hand. She was wearing a red jacket and her hair was short, and she was laughing at the camera.
I had never seen the photograph before. I sat with it in my hands for a long time.
Then I went through the rest of the envelope.
There was the letter from Franklin Bennett's father, dated 1998, saying the fence was a mistake and should be moved back to the wall. There was a photocopy of the 1998 survey. There were three letters from my mother to Thelma Halloran, written in the year before she
