At the time, grief made it difficult to fight for more answers.
The mother was not thinking like an investigator. She was a wife who had lost her husband and a parent who had lost three children. She was trying to understand how to wake up each morning in a home that suddenly felt too quiet.
She still had five daughters who needed her. There were breakfasts to prepare, questions to answer, laundry to fold, and ordinary responsibilities that did not stop simply because her heart had broken.
She learned how to move forward while carrying a loss she could never put down.
Five years passed.
The pain changed shape, but it never left.
She missed Ben. She missed the boys. She missed the version of her family that existed before that storm arrived.
Lucy was the youngest, and because she had been so small when it happened, she had always understood the loss differently. She remembered pieces of her father and brothers, but she did not have the same memories her older siblings carried.
