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.

The side gate was standing open. One of his trainers was lying on the grass beside the garden shed.

And not one person out of twenty-two adults could tell anybody how an eight-year-old boy had got out of a yard full of people who loved him.

They searched for months.

Roads. Trails. Four abandoned properties and a quarry that took eleven days.

Two hundred volunteers at the peak, with photographs. Strangers ringing in with sightings in four states, none of which ever led anywhere at all.

My wife started sleeping with the light on in his room.

Not with the door open. In there, in his bed, about four nights a week. She has not stopped and she is not going to.

And Birdie asked me every single evening, at the end of a story, whether her brother might be home before breakfast.

Four hundred and eleven evenings, give or take. I answered all of them.