It is why the official story never fit him, and it is why, when the truth finally came, it fit him so perfectly that I wept — because of course he had turned toward the drowning.

A man who would drive back an hour for a life jacket does not motor past two people going under.

So how?

How had the most careful man I had ever known taken our three sons onto a lake he knew better than our own backyard, on a day, and never brought a single one of them home?

How had all his caution, all his checking and rechecking, all his refusal to cut even the smallest corner, added up to the worst outcome imaginable?

I asked it of the officials, gently at first and then less gently.