Zachary stepped in beside me.

Christopher held Wyatt’s rod near the water.

Raymond rested a hand on his grandson’s shoulder.

The shutter clicked.

This time I was not afraid of what the photograph might take, or of all that it could not hold.

I simply let myself be there, fully, in the spring light by the water, knowing that my husband and my sons were gone and that the love and the courage and the plain decency they had lived by were not gone at all — that those had been pulled living out of the lake six years ago in the shape of a frightened boy, and were standing here now, grown and breathing, holding my son’s fishing rod in the sun.

I keep the new photograph beside the old one now.