I want to be honest, because the story could so easily be told as one, and it was not.

There was no secret survival, no hidden shore, no hope that after all these years they might still walk through a door.

They had gone into that lake and the lake had kept them, as it had the whole time.

Nothing I had learned changed that one unbearable fact.

But everything else was changed, utterly.

For six years I had been haunted by the image of my careful husband somehow failing, of some stupid preventable accident, of four lives lost to bad luck and a bad current for no reason at all.

And it had never been that.