In the photograph, the stairs rose on the wrong side of the house. Owen tried reversing the scan, but that made the lettering on a delivery van unreadable. His mother had labeled the picture home, winter, and he wanted to identify it before her memorial.
A retired builder remembered an outside staircase removed when the house was divided. Its replacement ran along the opposite wall. The photograph was not reversed; the building had changed around the family's memories of it.
The builder's invoice included a note asking him to preserve a loose tread. Under it, the family stored spare keys for neighbors. Owen found the tread among timber in the shed, with three names penciled underneath. Two belonged to people his mother described as strangers she only knew much later.
He displayed the photograph without trying to settle every inconsistency in her stories. Beside it lay the tread and a brief account of the alteration. People at the memorial supplied more names, dates and corrections. The house in the photograph became recognizable through their disagreement, rather than through a single account made artificially neat.