A family confirmed alive can be pursued.

But a family vanished, boat empty, bodies never found — that is a wound that cannot close, because closing requires an end, and the lake had given me no end, only an absence shaped exactly like four people and sealed with a question mark.

Chapter 6 — The Weeks of Searching

They searched for weeks.

I will never be able to repay what those people gave to the water in those weeks, looking for my family.

They came from everywhere, those first days — official crews and off-duty volunteers and people from towns I had never heard of who simply showed up because a man and his three sons were missing in the water and they could not stay home and do nothing.