For six years that water had been the thing that took my family, a dark mouth I could not look at without the question rising.

I had gone to its shore a thousand times in the early days and stood accusing it.

Now I stood on the same shore and it was only a lake again — calm, ordinary, catching the light, indifferent as water always is.

It had not changed.

I had.

Knowing what had happened on it had not made it innocent, exactly, but it had taken away its power to torment me, because I no longer stood there asking it a question.

I finally knew the answer, and the answer, though it left my family at the bottom of it, was an answer I could live beside.