I was not ready.

I do not think anything could have readied me.

For six years I had held Lucas still in my mind, a photograph, a set of frozen images worn thin with handling — and now here he was moving, alive, propping the phone up against the old wooden workbench in our garage so it stood at an angle while he organized his fishing gear, humming something under his breath, reaching off-screen for a reel.

The ordinariness of it destroyed me.