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.

He is with a specialist team twice a week. There is a very long way to go and nobody has given us a number and I have stopped asking for one.

I am not going to put one word of that on a page either.

He sleeps in our room.

Not in a bed in there. In a camp bed under the window, which he chose himself and which he asked for on the second night.

That is where he is going to sleep for as long as he wants to, and the four people who have gently suggested otherwise have been told so.

He has not asked me anything about February.

Not once in eleven weeks. Not about the car, not about the rain, not about what I said.

And I do not know whether that is because he does not remember saying it —

or because he remembers exactly what I said back, word for word, the way I now do.