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 went with a stack of flyers.

They were the missing posters. The first age-progression had just come out and Suzanne’s sister was printing them, and I had brought forty of them to leave on the table by the door, and I had asked the chair beforehand and she had said fine.

I was standing by that table with them in my hands when Verity Rakes came across the floor.

Roarke’s mother. She was sixty-two then.

She took that stack out of my hands — both hands, no hesitation — and she put it face down under her own arm.

And she said, to a room of forty:

“Give me those. You put that boy in a car. Nobody in here wants your flyers. You’re the reason he’s gone. Now sit down.”

The room went silent.

Forty people. The principal was eleven feet away. Two of the teachers I had worked with for nine years.