We got out of the car. We both stood there on the edge of the water, looking west toward the setting sun. The clouds were painted a hundred different shades of red and orange, the sky itself a color of teal blue I have never seen anywhere else.

You have to be outside to appreciate it. You have to feel the wind on your face, smell the freshwater scent in the air.

It is the largest lake in the world. It is terrifying, and deadly. There is no silt at the bottom, no soft bed to sleep in, no weeds to hide in. It is a lake lined in pure granite, a great rock crater carved into the ground by glaciers, filled with pure, sweet, cold water and not much else. A few whitefish. The splinters of broken wooden hulls. The silent steel walls of the Algoma, the Sunbeam, the Edmund Fitzgerald. The bones of the dead. The ghosts.

It is beautiful. God help me, on a summer night when the sun is going down, it is the most beautiful place on earth. This is why I’m here. This is why Jackie is here.

This is why we live through the long winters, the brutal cold, the blizzards that dump three feet of snow overnight, the incessant whining of the snow-mobiles. The long slow melt in the spring, the black flies in June, the mosquitoes in July and August. It is over so quickly, and then the air is cold again and the lake turns back into a monster.

For some of us, it is enough. We stay, year after year. Nowhere else would feel right to us. Nowhere else would be home.

In that summer of secrets, this was the biggest secret of all. Those of us who live here all kept the secret. We guarded it closely, and shared it with those few people who could not live here for whatever reason, but still chose to come back here whenever they could.

I couldn’t have guessed that even this secret would be in jeopardy that summer. I couldn’t have imagined it. How could one man ever threaten such a thing? One man.