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.

He said, “I was standing in the kitchen, Mom. I was four feet away with three glasses on a tray.”

I did not answer any of it, because I had agreed not to and because there is no answer to it.

We went to somebody. Six sessions, the two of us, in the winter. It was his idea and he booked it and I went.

The useful part was not anything about the basement. It was in the fourth one, when the counsellor asked me to describe what I had been doing every twelfth of March for twelve years, and Elliot heard the whole of it for the first time, including the eleven-hour drive in 2017.

And my son said, “You could have taken me.”

Which had genuinely never occurred to me in eight years.
PART 4 — ELEVEN MOVES

Here is what that young man had been living inside, as far as any of it has been established.