Helicopters hung over the surface with their downdraft flattening the water into silver.

Local volunteers, people who had never met us, walked the steep banks for miles in both directions, pushing through brush, calling names into the trees — Lucas, Wyatt, Mason, Jonah — until their voices gave out.

I went to the lake every day.

I could not help it.

I would stand on the shore in whatever weather there was and watch the boats make their patient passes, and I would hold the phone with the last photograph in it against my chest, and I would bargain with God in the childish, frantic way that grief makes of all of us.

Just one of them.