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.

Getting down on the floor in different rooms, one at a time. Ear against it. Waiting about four seconds before moving on to the next one.

The front room. The hall. The landing.

Because she had been doing it everywhere.

At home, on our own kitchen floor. In the back of the car. At school — which I have since confirmed with her teacher, who had assumed it was a game.

In the supermarket.

For fourteen months, my six-year-old daughter had been stopping four or five times a day, everywhere she went, and listening for her brother.

Four hundred days. Call it eighteen hundred times.

The rest of us stopped looking in about the September.

Not formally. Nobody announced it and nobody sat down and decided.

The posters came down off four shop windows because they had gone yellow. The group got quiet. And at some point in that autumn we all started saying when we find out instead of when we find him, and not one of us noticed we had done it.