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 my sister came through from the kitchen carrying a tray of tea.

Four cups. She had been in there about eleven minutes.

And her face, when she saw where my daughter was sitting, did something that I have not been able to stop seeing since.

“Why is she sitting there?”

“She says she can hear something.”

Roz looked at that floor.

“It’s the heating. This house makes noises.”

So I got down onto that floor next to my daughter and put my own ear against the hardwood.

Expecting the air conditioning. Expecting nothing. Expecting to be able to stand back up in four seconds and say there’s nothing there, sweetheart.

And I heard three soft taps.

Not a pipe. Not a click. Three, evenly spaced, with intent in them.

A pause of about four seconds. And then three more.

I looked at Birdie.

She had started crying without making one single sound, which is a thing that child learned to do at some point in the last fourteen months and which I did not know she could do.