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during Rose’s absence. The National Accelerator Research Lab had arrived, transforming Nicolet, and so what Rose found when she returned was not the sleepy rural town she remembered, but a bustling, blooming suburb.
    Rose bought a house in a neighborhood in the middle of what she remembered as the Anderson farm and which was now called Eagle’s Crest. On one side of Eagle’s Crest, there now stood Heritage Village, a living history museum where reenactors in period costumes performed the settling of the country, manifest destiny, conquering the prairie day after day for tourists and school groups. And on the other side of the neighborhood, beyond the rolling, manicured greens of the new golf club, which had been built on land that had once marked the border between the Amundson and Heggestadt farms, there now stood the imposing National Accelerator Research Lab, its twenty-story Research Tower rising up over the prairie.
    The townspeople were split in their opinions regarding the purpose of the Lab. Some argued it was a secret research facility for UFOs. Some believed the scientists there were studying invisibility, the better to battle the Communists. Others swore it was a testing ground for remote viewing experimentation.
    But the truth was at once more magnificent and more mundane. The Lab was a facility for the study of high-energy particle physics, where scientists employed a particle accelerator to collide protons and antiprotons, watching the detectors for signs of new, smaller particles, all the while attempting to puzzle out the mysteries of string theory, supersymmetry, gauge theories, leptons, neutrinos, and quarks.

    In building the Lab, the government, noting the principle of eminent domain, had, as they put it in the official literature, annexed the surrounding land holdings, each family finding one morning on their doorstep a grim-faced government official whose job it was to break the news.
    In a letter to the editor of the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner , one local farmer wrote that he considered it “dastardly to build such a facility on some of the richest farming soil in the world.”
    Rose’s parents had not, like so many of their neighbors, lost their farm to the Lab. But they had seen their small rural town transform around them, swelling and sprawling as neighborhoods sprung up to accommodate both the displaced farm families and the Lab’s scientists. And so, when Rose returned to Nicolet to raise Lily, this was the town she found.
    Some of the former farmers still longed for their land, refusing to attend the annual picnics the Lab put on for the displaced families, during which they were invited back into their homes, many of which had been moved via trailer to a small, clustered area the Lab called “the village” and now housed offices or the families of visiting physicists.
    But not all of the families had been so resolute. Once the initial shock and surprise wore off, there were those who, recognizing the declining role of small family farms and watching their taxes rise year by year, had been pleased to accept the price the government offered, had been watching for years as the land surrounding Chicago grew from farmland to suburb and had realized that, Lab or no Lab, it was only a matter of time.

    Rose pushed Lily up and down the aisles of the grocery store. Lily, perched in her seat in the cart, offered a running commentary on what she thought they needed. A bright and precocious child, she’d begun speaking in full sentences. There had been no preliminaries, no warm-up sounds, no baby’s babbling in imitation of adult language. “Look at that dilapidated building,” she’d said abruptly one morning, pointing from her car seat in the back of her mother’s station wagon. One day she’d been silent, regarding her mother with her wise baby eyes, and the next, she was conversant. Now she chattered on as they made their way up and down the