I asked it of Zachary.

I asked it of the ceiling at three in the morning.

I asked it of Lucas himself, in the one-sided conversations the grieving hold with the dead.

And no one could answer it, because the only answer that fit the man was an answer no one had — that he had not failed at all, that the carefulness had held right to the end, that whatever took them had taken them while they were doing the most careful and most reckless thing a good man can do, which is to risk his own safety for someone else’s.

I did not have that answer for six years.