It was waiting for you.”

I held the whistle in my fist, this small plastic thing my son had bought after arguing about its color for ten minutes at a counter, this thing he had given away to a frightened boy in the water in the last hour of his life, and I wept in a stranger’s workshop for the children who had done such a thing without being told to, because they were their father’s sons.

No one had told those boys to throw the vests.

No one had drilled into them a protocol for what to do when another boat went over in a storm.