A swamped boat.

Bodies carried downstream.

It was reasonable.

It fit the evidence they had.

And it was wrong in the one way that mattered most, though it would take six years and a dead phone to show me how.

I nodded whenever they repeated it to me.

I signed the paperwork — there was so much paperwork, forms that turn a family into a case number, documents that ask you to certify in writing that the people you love are legally presumed dead.

I listened to the formal explanations delivered in their formal, careful voices.