My 6-year-old daughter pressed her ear to my sister’s floor and whispered, “Daddy, Tobin is crying down there.” My son had been missing for 14 months, and everyone told me she was imagining things — until I heard three faint taps beneath the hardwood.

The first time my daughter told me she could hear her brother underneath the floor, I was standing in my sister’s new front room holding a cup of coffee.

Trying to remember what an ordinary Saturday with my family used to feel like.

My daughter Birdie is six years old and she is the reason this story has an ending.

She was kneeling by the fireplace with one small hand flat on the boards, leaning down sideways until her cheek was almost touching them.

I thought she had dropped something under the furniture. That is genuinely what I thought, for about four seconds, holding a cup of coffee.

And then she looked up at me with a face I had not seen on that child since the first month after her brother went.

“Daddy. I think Tobin’s down there.” Very quietly. “I can hear him crying.”

I could not make myself move for about four seconds.