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.

She sat down on her own stairs, halfway up, and put both hands flat on her knees.

And she stayed exactly like that until they took her out of that house. She has not contested one single thing since, at any point, in eleven weeks.

That was the eleventh of March.

The FBI had the case inside about four hours, because of what it had been for fourteen months and because of the state line.

And at about ten o’clock that night, in a room at a hospital in Cranmere —

with Annika holding our son’s hand and Birdie asleep across two plastic chairs with my coat over her —

a woman called Agent Sowerby sat down opposite me, with nothing in her hands, and asked me whether the name Dalton meant anything to me.

Dalton is my brother. My older brother, by six years. He is forty-six.

He was at that farmhouse on the ninth of June. He was in about eleven of the photographs from that afternoon and he helped search until two in the morning.