I did not yet understand how it was possible.

I did not yet know a single piece of the story that had put him on my neighbor’s porch.

But the number did not lie.

Whatever had been done, and by whom, and however impossible it seemed, the thin, frightened, food-hiding boy who checked the locks in my house was, beyond any doubt, my child.

And a grave I had wept at for seven years was, I now understood, going to have to be opened.

I have thought often about those two kinds of weeping, the grief for the dead and the weeping for the living, because I am one of the very few people who has done both over the same child, and the difference between them taught me something about hope I had spent seven years trying to kill.