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 took my son to a rented flat she was living in while that house was being finished.

And then, in the October, she moved him into the house. Deliberately. With a van, like anybody moving anything.

Fourteen months and two days.

Why would a woman do that.

That is the question four hundred people have asked and it is the only question I was interested in for about three weeks.

She has given one answer.

She has given it four separate times now — to two agents, to her own lawyer, and to me — and every single time it has been in exactly the same four words.

She said: I believed him immediately.

Four words. That is the whole of her explanation for fourteen months.

And then she said the other half of it.

That is the part that took what was left of my family apart a second time, about eleven weeks after the first.