Jul 5, 2026 · 16 min · 9 segments
Episode 250. Thank you for 250 nights in the dark with us! The summer he came back was the hottest anyone could remember. Fourteen months after her eight-year-old son drowned in the reservoir…
The summer he came back was the hottest anyone could remember.
I want to start there, with the heat, because you need to understand it to understand the rest.
By the second week of July, the grass had gone the colour of straw, and the air over the road shimmered, like something about to catch fire.
The weather people kept using words like historic and unprecedented, and the reservoir was dropping an inch a day.
And at night the house held the day's heat, the way a stone holds it, long after the sun is gone.
We slept on top of the sheets.
We left every window open and prayed for a breeze that never came.
You couldn't get cool.
That's the thing I need you to feel before anything else.
That whole month, nobody in that town could get cool.
So when I tell you that I was grateful, the first night, for how cold he was, I need you to understand that the heat is part of why I let it happen.
My name doesn't matter.
What matters is that 14 months before that July, my son drowned.
Toby was eight.
He'd be ten now, if...
He went into the reservoir on a Sunday in May when I was 20 feet away with my back turned, talking to another mother about nothing, about a school fundraiser, about something I cannot for the life of me remember.
And by the time I turned around, the water was flat and quiet and there was no one in it.
They dragged it for nine days.
The reservoir is deep and it is old and it does not give things back.
They never found him.
That is its own particular kind of horror, the not-finding, and I won't pretend it isn't.
There's no box in the ground.
There's no place to go.
There's just the water, sitting there at the bottom of our valley, holding my child somewhere inside it, every single day.
You don't survive a thing like that.
The summer he came back was the hottest anyone could remember.
I want to start there, with the heat, because you need to understand it to understand the rest.
By the second week of July, the grass had gone the colour of straw, and the air over the road shimmered, like something about to catch fire.
The weather people kept using words like historic and unprecedented, and the reservoir was dropping an inch a day.
And at night the house held the day's heat, the way a stone holds it, long after the sun is gone.
We slept on top of the sheets.
We left every window open and prayed for a breeze that never came.
You couldn't get cool.
That's the thing I need you to feel before anything else.
That whole month, nobody in that town could get cool.
So when I tell you that I was grateful, the first night, for how cold he was, I need you to understand that the heat is part of why I let it happen.
My name doesn't matter.
What matters is that 14 months before that July, my son drowned.
Toby was eight.
He'd be ten now, if...
He went into the reservoir on a Sunday in May when I was 20 feet away with my back turned, talking to another mother about nothing, about a school fundraiser, about something I cannot for the life of me remember.
And by the time I turned around, the water was flat and quiet and there was no one in it.
They dragged it for nine days.
The reservoir is deep and it is old and it does not give things back.
They never found him.
That is its own particular kind of horror, the not-finding, and I won't pretend it isn't.
There's no box in the ground.
There's no place to go.
There's just the water, sitting there at the bottom of our valley, holding my child somewhere inside it, every single day.
You don't survive a thing like that.
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