The late autumn wind whipped my hair as I looked out at the wooden dock in front of me. Although no snow had fallen yet, the air was bitterly cold.

Although surely not as cold as the watery depths where Myra's body had been discovered.

Driving here, I felt extremely conflicted. What was the point, really? Nothing was going to bring her back. Surely, my logical brain knew this. But I had to see it for myself. I had to understand what she saw in her last moment's on Earth.

Last Wednesday, I got the phone call that no parent ever wants to get. It's the call that happens to parents on the news, but never ever to you.

Except that this time, it did.

I was woken up at just after 2AM on a regular, November week night, by the sound of my cell phone buzzing.

At first, I ignored the call and silently berated myself for forgetting to turn on "Do Not Disturb". Surely, this was another one of the handful of spam calls one gets a few times a week. When I didn't pick up, however, the phone continued to buzz. And buzz. With bleary eyes, I grabbed my device and eyed the incoming call. A call from an unknown number with a 534 area code was coming in. A jolt of panic. That was the area code of Myra's college town.

"Hello - is this Mr. Reed?"

What followed after that was a careful delivery on the part of the police dispatcher conversing with me to inform me that some local upstate New York kids had been playing earlier this evening at Covington Lake and had found something strange floating in the water. That something strange had turned out to be a body. Myra's body.