It was recognition — the deep, wordless recognition of a wife who knew that her husband’s death, as described, was not a death her husband could have died.

I did not know, in those years, that I was right.

I only knew that I could not stop asking, and that the people around me had begun to wish, for my own sake, that I would.

I understood their wish, and I could not grant it.

They wanted me to stop for the kindest of reasons — because the asking was keeping the wound open, because a woman who cannot close a chapter cannot fully live the next one, because my daughters needed a mother who was present and not forever half-submerged in a lake six years gone.

All of that was true.