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 she kept saying we should come up and see the new house near Cranmere.

She said it about four times between Christmas and March. She said a change of walls might do Birdie good.

It is in a quiet gated development. Big lawns, old trees, four houses on that stretch.

Enormous windows. Pale paint. Furniture arranged in a way that suggests nobody has ever sat in it.

Roz has always been particular about how things look. Properly particular.

That has been a joke in our family for about twenty years and I have made it myself at least four times.

I had never once in my life thought of it as anything else.

Not until about twenty past two on the eleventh of March.

“Sweetheart,” I said, getting down next to Birdie. “What makes you think Tobin’s under the floor?”

She pressed her hand harder against the wood.

“Because he told me he’s cold, Daddy. And he wants to come upstairs.”