Whenever I brought up the lake — the question, the thing that did not fit — something shifted in his posture, a stiffening, a looking-away, that I noticed without understanding.

At the time I filed it under grief.

We were all strange in those years; we all flinched at things; the mind in mourning is a house with trick floors, and I assumed Zachary’s discomfort was just his own version of the same brokenness we were all living in.

I did not think, Zachary is hiding something.

Why would I?

He was the one who came in the rain to change my tire.