Our family album was always an enigma, tucked away in my mother’s bedroom. My parents divorced when I was 9 years old, and most of what I know about my father comes from the photographs my mother kept and stories from those who knew him. We rarely spoke of him, yet my father remained a titular ghost, looming over us, uninvited. My father is a soil scientist. I became a horticulturist. When I finally encountered the archive, I expected it to mirror what I carried: rage, hurt, a haunting absence. Instead I found birthdays, weddings, honeymoons and portraits of family and friends since forgotten. This archive refused my feelings. In their place came a different confusion, why had my mother kept these at all, these images of a man who had chosen not to stay? The grief sent me looking, not with any clear method, but with the instinct of a child given a colouring book with half the pages missing, pressing colour into the outlines. I turned these documents over, looking for the seams in the family so carefully composed. I began to cut up, paint over and paint in these photographs,because a photograph insists it is the whole of what happened, and these were not. These new compositions do not offer a resolution. Instead, they offer an account of a life lived in the gap between the recorded and the withheld. I began making my own photographs to inhabit the blank pages my mother left behind, using the camera to claim the years that fell through the physical album. Each composition serves as a site where her mythography and my lived experience are held together: unresolved but reconciled. We continue to construct fictions. It is the necessary architecture of how to live.