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.

I locked a frightened young man in a basement for nine minutes because I had waited twelve years to find him and I was not going to let him walk out of my front door.

That is the true reason and it is not a good one.

Verity Rakes died in 2021. I found that out afterward, from the newspaper archive, when I went looking for something else.

She never knew. She spent the last eight years of her life believing what she said in that cafeteria, and she said it to a room of forty people who let it stand, and eleven of them are still in this town and two of them have been perfectly pleasant to me in a supermarket since.

You put that boy in a car. You’re the reason he’s gone.

She said that to me in a school cafeteria in the May of 2013 with forty missing posters face down under her arm.