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.

And she said: “I rang you on the fourteenth of every month for fourteen months, Grady. You never once asked me why.”

She said it quietly. There was nothing in it. It is the only thing she has said to me since March.

I had not. Not once.

I had thought it was kindness. I had told four people that my sister was a saint.

It was a woman handing me an opening, on the same date, every month, fourteen separate times —

and every single time I took it and talked about the search for eleven minutes and then said thanks and put the phone down.

Our mother is not speaking to either of us. She has not been to see Tobin and she has not written to Roz.

Our father rings me on Sundays at about four o’clock. We talk about nothing at all for eleven minutes — the truck, the weather, a fence.