The reservoir dropped forty feet that summer, and the old town of Hesper rose up out of the water at last. My crew got hired to map and catalogue the place before the floods came back in fall. On my first dive, my lamp swept across a kitchen. There it was: a table still set for four, the plates rinsed perfectly clean by the lake.

Instead of filming, I followed the kitchen out into a hallway. My lamp found a staircase going up, the steps strangely free of mud. Most of Hesper was buried in silt, but not this house. Something kept it clean. I started up the stairs to find out what.

Halfway up, my lamp caught a row of photographs still hanging on the wall, glass intact. A family of four, smiling on a dock. But in every single photo, their faces were turned away from the camera now, looking down the stairs, toward me.

I turned to go back down, but the photographs were closer now, every frame slid to the edge of its hook. Then the family in the pictures stepped out of the glass, one by one, dripping onto the stairs between me and the open water below. They came up smiling, and there was nowhere left to go but into their arms.