Just give me back one.

And then, ashamed: no, all of them, give me all of them, I take it back.

But the lake gave back nothing.

Not a body, not a shoe, not a life jacket, not a single sign of where four people had gone.

The water closed over the question and held it, and week by week the search grew smaller — fewer boats, fewer volunteers, the helicopters first — until one gray afternoon a kind man with exhausted eyes came to tell me, as gently as such a thing can be told, that they were going to have to scale back the active search.

I want to be fair to them, because it would be easy, in grief, not to be.