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.

It was documents.

He had no birth certificate he could use. No social security number he could recite. No licence in his own name. Everything was in Roarke’s hands or did not exist, and a nineteen-year-old with no paper cannot rent, cannot work legally, cannot open an account, cannot leave.

He got into Halvorsen State on the strength of a transcript from that online programme and a grant application his father filled in, and he was living in a room off campus paid in cash.

He had never once searched his own name, because he did not know it.

He met my son in a study group in the October.

The identification took four days and it was not a dramatic moment. It was a DNA comparison against a sample Suzanne Rakes had given a clearinghouse in 2013 and that had been sitting in a database for twelve years waiting.

Roarke Rakes was arrested in the September in a rental house two counties over. He is awaiting trial and I am not going to write anything else about him because I have been asked not to.