It was such a Lucas gesture that I laughed out loud through my tears, a short broken sound.

He was never good at talking directly about feelings; the men in his family had been raised to treat emotion as weather to be endured in silence.

So he talked through objects instead.

A life jacket tossed on a bench was my husband saying, in the only language he fully trusted, I am worried about you and I want you where I can see you — and Zachary, raised in the same wordless house, would have understood it perfectly.

“You need this weekend, Zach,” he said.