He was family.

It did not occur to me, could not have occurred to me, that the brother grieving in my kitchen was carrying a specific and terrible secret, and that his campaign to make me stop asking about the lake was not indifference to my pain but the opposite — a desperate, misguided effort to keep me away from a truth he thought would destroy me.

“Andrea, you have to stop doing this to yourself,” he said one afternoon, setting down his coffee.

“I just want to understand what happened out there,” I said.