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.

I am more grateful for those eleven minutes than I can explain to anybody.

And And then there is Birdie.

She is six years old. She is seeing somebody once a week and she is, by a considerable distance, doing better than any of the three of us.

I asked her, in about the fourth week, as gently as I have ever asked anybody anything, how she had known.

And she looked at me the way a six-year-old looks at you when you have asked something extremely obvious.

She said: “Because I listened.”

Four words. And then she went back to what she was doing.

And then she told me the rest of it, over about four minutes, while colouring something in.

This is the part I would actually like people to take away from any of this.

She had been doing it at Auntie Roz’s house since Christmas. Both visits.