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 want to say what twelve years of that is, because it is not grief and it does not have a name.

It is a folder on a laptop. Mine has eleven things in it: five images, the newspaper piece from the March, two from the anniversary years, the card Suzanne sent me, and a photograph I took on my phone of my own nurse’s log page before I handed the originals over.

I opened that folder perhaps four times a year for twelve years and I never once told my husband I was doing it.

Ray knew about the case, obviously. Everybody in Barrow Mills knew. What he did not know was the folder, or that I had a calendar alert set for the twelfth of March that I renewed every year, or that in 2017 I drove eleven hours to a town in another state because a woman on a forum thought she had seen a boy at a gas station.