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 heard it exactly the way I heard it, from four feet away — and she looked at me to answer it, and I did.

So there are two of us.

We are in a room together on Thursday evenings with somebody whose job this is. It is the hardest thing either of us has ever done and it is the only reason this marriage is still standing.

Roz has pleaded guilty. To all of it, at the very first opportunity.

She will be sentenced in the autumn. Her lawyer has not approached us for one thing — no letter, no request, nothing about a statement.

I have been to see her once.

I went to ask that woman one question.

Why she never came to me. Not in the February, not on the night of the ninth of June, and not in any of the fourteen months while she was ringing me on the fourteenth of every single one of them.