We had gotten David out of the water.

Now we could begin to fight.

And I noticed, in those first stabilized days, a thing I have never forgotten: how quickly a man’s dignity returns once the ground beneath him stops moving.

Within a week of sleeping in a bed, shaving off the ragged beard, working a real job, and picking his sons up from school like an ordinary father, David began to look like himself again — not fixed, not healed, the deeper wounds were still there, but recognizable.

The tremor left his hands.

He started standing up straight.