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 was told, at seven, in a truck, that his mother had died.

Not immediately. Within the first few weeks. There was a story about an accident and a story about why they could not go back, and he was seven and he believed it, because at seven the man driving the truck is the world.

His name became Kai Loring in about 2014. Roarke Rakes was calling himself Wes Loring.

Eleven addresses in twelve years, across four states. Never more than about eighteen months. He changed schools six times and then stopped going at fifteen, and he did the rest of it online through a programme that does not ask many questions.

What kept him there after he was old enough to leave was not fear. This is the part that people find hardest and it is the part Detective Rincon told me is the most common thing in the world.