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.

stop the car.

I mean that literally. There is almost always somewhere to pull in.

Ask the next question. And then ask the one after that.

Get it wrong. Be embarrassing about it. Ruin the holiday, ruin Easter, be the one that four people have to manage at family things for the next decade.

All of that is cheap. I know exactly what it costs now and it is nothing.

Because they will tell you once in words.

Once. That is the whole allocation, and they will spend it somewhere dark where they do not have to look at you.

And after that they will tell you with their feet.

Three times. Politely. Each one slightly easier for you to overrule than the one before, because by the third one they already know the answer and are mostly asking out of habit.

And then one evening at about four minutes past seven, in June, in a yard with twenty-two adults in it —