It had gone to the lake in my husband’s boat and it had not come home, and the only way both of those things could be true was if, somewhere out on that water, the vest meant for the brother who didn’t come had ended up around the body of someone who had needed it more.”

“That’s exactly what I want to know,” I said.

That missing vest became the whole of my focus, because it was the first hard, physical thing in six years that the official story could not account for.

An accident caused by an undercurrent does not explain an extra life jacket that arrives at a lake and then vanishes.

Through a friend of a friend, we found a retired search coordinator, a careful old professional who had worked that region’s waters for thirty years and who agreed, when he heard the story, to pull the original investigation file and go through it with me.

We sat at his kitchen table with the yellowed inventory pages spread out between us, the catalog of everything that had been recovered from the scene and the boat all those years ago.