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.

The bell went at four and my son ran to the door. Ran. Nineteen years old.

He came into the kitchen with a young man beside him and he was grinning in a way I had not seen on him in about two years.

“Mom, this is Kai.”

And I stopped.

I had a serving spoon in my hand and I stood in my own kitchen and everything in me went cold from the scalp down.

Because I knew that face.

I did not think I knew it. I did not half-recognise it. I have known that face since the twelfth of March 2013, and I have looked at a version of it every two years for twelve years, and the last one came out when he was seventeen.

He has a scar through his left eyebrow that splits it in two, about eleven millimetres, and I know that because I cleaned it and closed it with two adhesive strips at a nurse’s station at Barrow Mills Elementary in the February of 2013, and I photographed it, and I wrote it down.