My son brought his boyfriend home for Sunday dinner, and the second I saw that young man’s face I went cold with a serving spoon still in my hand. Twenty minutes later I had locked him in my own basement and was calling the police — and I was wrong to do it, and I would do it again, and both of those are true.

They opened that door themselves. Not me. That was made extremely clear to me at the time and I have not forgotten it.

Kai Loring was sitting on the third step down with his back against the wall.

He was nineteen years old and he thought he was being arrested for driving on a licence that was not his.

That is what he had worked out in those nine minutes, alone, in a stranger’s basement. He had put together a story in which my son’s mother had recognised him from something to do with a car and had trapped him, and he had decided not to run because running would make it worse, and he had sat down on a step and waited.

Detective Rincon spent about four hours with him and I was not in the room for any of it.

What I did during those four hours was sit in my own kitchen and be spoken to by Deputy Amara, twice, in a way I would like to set down accurately.