Aline Machado is sleeping, but it is the sleep of a parent with a toddler nearby. When the phone rings in the early morning, she answers it immediately. It is her mother.

At first, Aline does not understand what her mother is saying. Then she hears the words "airplane" and "Chape." Her head starts pounding. She sits up in bed and turns on the television. There are confusing reports about something happening.

She feels sick. She calls Antonella's nanny to come over so she won't be alone. The text-message group of Chape wives and girlfriends buzzes on her phone over and over. No one knows what is going on. No one knows what to believe. One woman says that someone from Colombia has messaged her on Facebook but that she is not sure if it is reliable. The person says there are no fatalities, that it was just an emergency landing. There is hope. The television and radio voices keep talking but not saying anything for certain. Then the reports begin mentioning "some" survivors, and the phone buzzes more.

Aline believes Filipe is alive. She believes she can feel him. She has known Filipe since they were children. On their first date, he took her to see pigs. Some of her friends thought it was strange, but she understood. The pigs were at a farm his family owned on the outskirts of Gravataí, near Porto Alegre. Filipe imagined that someday he would turn the farm into a soccer field for the community. He would build the locker rooms himself. He would put up goals and children would come and play. He would run camps and clinics. It would be his to share.

So on that first date, when they were just teenagers, Filipe was showing Aline his dream. She felt his passion, his ambition that day. She felt his enthusiasm. And now, in the middle of the night, she still feels it. When the TV says a defender is among the survivors, she is sure it is Filipe. She is sure of it. When the TV says it is Neto, she is happy, because it means one of Filipe's friends survived, too.

She goes to Rosangela's house. Rosangela is married to Cléber Santana, the captain of the team. Filipe and Cléber Santana are close; when Cléber Santana was substituted late in the game against São Paulo, Filipe took the captain's armband and finished the game as the team's leader.

Aline is going to pick up Rosangela, and the two of them will go to the stadium together to wait for more news with the other wives. When Aline comes into Rosangela's living room, the TV is on. Rosangela is sitting there. Aline looks at her and then looks at the TV and hears the reporter say, "There are no more survivors." She stares at the TV for a beat or two or three. Then Aline wails and collapses to the ground.

After 20 minutes, Aline and Rosangela collect themselves and go to the stadium. They sit in the locker room with wives and girlfriends and mothers and fathers. Everyone connected to the club has come to the stadium, because no one knows where else to go. Even Chiquinho is there. Graziele is hysterical. Someone says, "Be strong, Grazi, for the baby." A locker room attendant begins to gather the players' clothing, putting things in bags.

In one corner is Marina. She feels torn. Jacqueline, Val, Susanna, Aline, Rosangela -- they are all crying. Marina is crying, too, but her fiancé, Alan Ruschel, is alive. The team doctor took Marina aside and told her Alan was in surgery in Colombia. She does not know the details of the surgery, but she knows Alan is alive. She tries to comfort her friends, to hold them and hug them, but they know her partner is not dead like theirs. They know she is not left alone, and, already, it is different.

When the man collecting clothes from the lockers comes around to Alan's, Marina stops him. He seems confused. She looks around and tries to whisper. "No," she says under her breath. "No. Don't take these."

Rafael Henzel does not know what happened. He does not know where he is, exactly. But he sees lights moving and hears strange voices and tries to call out. "I'm here!" he shouts. "I'm here!"

He calls out for his radio colleague, his friend. "Renan? Renan?" Renan Agnolin, his partner, was sitting next to him on the plane. But Rafael cannot see him anymore. He calls Renan's name again and again, but there is no answer.

Slowly, Rafael begins to realize there are trees around him. Then he sees faces. There are five or six men. There is a woman. They are talking to him and pulling at his clothes. He yells at them, "Don't rip my shirt! Don't cut my trousers!" He is worried he will lose the only change of clothes he has in Colombia. They tell him he is going to be OK, that they are going to help him. One keeps shouting, "Don't go to sleep, Rafa! Don't go to sleep!"

Rafael does not know he was in the back piece of the plane, the one that plugged in the soft earth on the near side of the mountain. He does not know that the elevation and the fog and the mud made it impossible for helicopters to land at the crash site, and that it took hours before rescue workers could arrive. He does not know that he will be extracted from the site in the back of a pickup truck because ambulances cannot get to him.

Once he reaches the hospital, he has a vague understanding of what has happened but knows no specifics. He knows the plane crashed, but the doctors do not tell him how many people are dead. He does not know that Alan Ruschel kept asking the doctors, "Where are my friends?" as he was wheeled into surgery. He does not know that Follmann, the backup goalkeeper, will have his leg amputated below the knee or that one physician will describe Neto to a television station as "currently" alive, because he does not want to be presumptuous. Rafael does not know that Danilo survived the crash and was rescued, only to die at the hospital.

A day later, Rafael's wife arrives and traces her finger over his face, where a tree branch or a piece of wreckage has gouged a wound above his right eye. He has a swollen abdomen from his seven broken ribs and a tube down his throat and is sedated. She looks at him and says, "I came to get you," and his eyes grow moist.

She wants Rafael to focus on himself, on his own recovery, so she and the doctors tell him the story in stages. Three days after the crash, Rafael learns that there are only a few survivors. No one tells him about exactly how the plane went down. No one tells him that there are so many coffins in the San Vicente funeral home in Medellín that they have to be kept in the parking garage because there is no room inside. No one tells him that two days of school have been canceled in Chapecó and that residents are holding vigils all day at the stadium and that children have written cards and drawn pictures that are piling up outside the gates. No one tells him the city is in mourning.

On Saturday, five days after the crash, Rafael finally looks at the list, finally reads all the names. That morning, three C-130 Hercules aircraft from the Brazilian Air Force arrive in Chapecó with all the bodies. The coffins are loaded onto several open-sided box trucks, a dozen or more in each, and driven from the airport to the stadium. Shrouded in white and wrapped in plastic because of the rain, the coffins are carried in by the soldiers.

Chiquinho and his men have set out the flowers and the bunting. They have also left only one set of goalposts on the field -- the one Danilo was guarding when he made the save against San Lorenzo that sent Chape to the final. Danilo's wife places a picture of Danilo in the goalmouth. The godfather of Danilo's son pounds the crossbar with Danilo's gloves. Under the tent, Danilo's mother hugs Filipe's father and whispers, "Why did he have to make that save in the last minute?"

The president of Brazil is there. The FIFA president is there. Nearly 100,000 people, or about half the population of the city, are inside the Arena Condá or directly outside. There is coverage of the memorial all over the world.

There were 77 people on the plane. Twenty-two were Chapecoense players, and three survived. Twenty-three more were coaches or team staff, and there were two team guests. There were 21 journalists, including Rafael, and there was the flight crew, all of whom perished except for one flight attendant and a maintenance technician. Of the 71 who died, there were 64 Brazilians, five Bolivians, one Venezuelan and one Paraguayan. Fifty coffins come to the memorial in Chapecó; the rest are flown elsewhere for separate services.

In the hospital, Rafael does not watch any of the ceremony on television. He does not see the stadium's exterior wrapped in a giant black ribbon. He does not listen to the speeches where the mayor likens the rain to God's tears. He can't bear any of it. It is too fresh. Instead, he just looks at the list, reading the names of his friends over and over.

Aline Machado goes to the airport to see Filipe's coffin come off the military plane. Then, she goes to the stadium. She feels strange. She does not want to be around people from Chape, does not want to talk about how the club must be "força, força," or strong in the face of tragedy. Aline does not want to be strong. She is angry.

She has so many questions, so many things that do not make sense to her. Two stand out: Why did a Brazilian team hire a Bolivian airline to take it to Colombia? And what was the pilot thinking?

Filipe's father, Osmar, is mad, too. Filipe died on Osmar's birthday, and Osmar cannot stop reading news reports about LaMia and the pilot. Within days, he reads that LaMia was a twice-failed Venezuelan airline whose name was sold to Bolivian investors and relaunched in 2015. He learns it had three planes and that only one was operational. He learns the pilot, Miguel Quiroga, was in trouble with the Bolivian air force for leaving his military service early with no explanation. And he learns that Miguel Quiroga was also one of the owners of LaMia.

This infuriates him. He tells Aline, "The pilot is a murderer," as he hears more and more on television and the radio. Most crashes involve a massive fire because the fuel explodes, but investigators say all the LaMia fuel gauges found in the wreckage were "below zero" so there was no fire, no explosion. The official flight plan Quiroga filed is scrutinized, and investigators believe that Quiroga might have underreported the weight of the flight. Also, the maximum flying time before fuel ran out -- 4 hours, 22 minutes -- was listed as the exact same amount of time as the expected trip time, with no safety buffer for things such as circling the arrival airport to let another plane land in front of it.

Why did the plane crash? Osmar cringes when he says it: It ran out of gas.

The club makes statements about how LaMia had flown other soccer teams in South America and was reputable. There was only a day or two in between winning the semifinal and leaving for the trip, it says, so the time to make decisions about the travel plans was short. The team had flown with LaMia earlier in the tournament and had been satisfied. It liked the way LaMia put Chape's logo on the plane and on the headrests of the seats. Using a charter airline was more efficient, as well, the club says, because it meant the team could leave right after the game and get back sooner than if it had to wait for a commercial flight the next day.

It does not add up for Osmar or Aline, and Osmar seethes as he reads about a few other LaMia employees being questioned by Bolivian police. An investigation into the flight controller is underway, too. There is no official word from LaMia yet, but to Osmar it feels so simple: It was about money. Chape flew with LaMia, he tells his family, because it was a little bit cheaper than chartering with Gol or another Brazilian commercial airline. And Quiroga did not stop to refuel when he should have, Osmar says, because it would have taken money out of his own pocket. Quiroga tried to push it to save a little, and so Filipe is dead.

Aline talks to a lawyer. There are discussions about lawsuits, about legal action. There are meetings. Some other wives and family members are interested, but many just want to move on, to try to figure out how to put their lives back together without their husband or son or brother.

Aline wants to move on, too, but every time she leaves the room, Antonella tenses up. Every time she goes to the store, Antonella cries nervously. At the "Paw Patrol" birthday party, Aline will be alone. And at Filipe's farm, the locker room isn't finished, and the grass needs cutting, and the field still needs lines. Every time Aline goes there, to let Antonella run around or to simply look out over the countryside, she feels as if she is looking at a story that ends in the middle of a sentence.

That is why Aline cannot just move on. And so she keeps talking to the lawyer, keeps asking questions, even though there are no answers. Whenever she tries to ask anyone at the club about what happened, she is told that all the directors at Chape who made the decision to use LaMia were on the plane. She is told that all the directors who made the decision are dead.