They had simply done it, instantly, the way you do a thing you have absorbed so completely from watching a parent that it has stopped being a lesson and become an instinct.

Lucas had spent their whole short lives modeling it — that when someone is in trouble on the water, you go, you help, you do not calculate the cost to yourself first.

They had watched him be that their entire lives.

And when the moment came, with their father beside them doing exactly what he had always done, they were that too, without hesitation, because it was simply who they had been raised to be.

Chapter 24 — Use Both Arms