The driveway, six years ago — four people waving, alive, with no idea what was coming.

And the shore, this spring — a different, smaller, stranger family, assembled out of a tragedy and a rescue, standing in the light.

The two pictures belong together.

They are the beginning and the end of the same story, and the story is not, it turns out, the one I thought I was living for six years.

It was never a story about an accident.

It was a story about four people who were brave and good when it counted most, and about a boy who lived because of it, and about a mother who finally, after six long years, got to stop asking how, and was allowed instead to know why, and to be proud.