They hadn't abandoned me.
They thought I'd abandoned them.
I was still trying to understand how we'd all been so wrong when a shadow fell across the letters.
I looked up.
Two young men and a woman were standing several yards away.
The older man stepped forward. "Harold?"
"Yes."
He smiled, but his eyes were wet.
"I'm Oscar. Tommy's son."
The woman beside him introduced herself as Ray's daughter, Anna.
The younger man was Nick's son, Luis.
Suddenly I understood. "You brought these?"
Oscar nodded.
"They made us promise we'd come, even if they couldn't."
Something in the way he said it made my stomach drop.
"Couldn't?"
His expression changed.
Tommy had died eight months earlier.
Cancer.
He'd known he probably wouldn't make it to the lake, so he'd prepared his box.
Ray had already been gone.
I looked at Luis.
I couldn't ask, and he seemed to understand that.
