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 then, at some point in the autumn, she stopped asking.

Everybody told me that was a good sign.

Four separate people said it to me in those words. A professional said a longer version of it in a room with four chairs in it.

I never once believed that meant she had stopped waiting.

I was right about that. And I did absolutely nothing with being right, for six months, which is its own entry on a list I keep now.

My sister Rosamund was one of the people who got us through that year.

Roz brought food to our house when Annika could not manage to make any. Four or five times a week, for about two months.

She came to two meetings with investigators and took notes in a hardback book.

And she rang me on the fourteenth of every single month. Nobody else did that. Not one other person in that family.