It means my living son is behind it, safe, and warm, and complaining about his homework, and leaving his muddy sneakers in the middle of the hall, and asking me every weekend when I’ll take him up in the yellow plane again.

I lost seven years to a forged signature that took someone a few seconds to write.

But I got my boy back — because a neighbor thought something was wrong, and a doctor reopened a forgotten record, and someone opened an empty urn at last, and a group of ordinary people stopped assuming that someone else had already checked.

That is the whole of what I learned, and it is why I volunteer now, walking beside other families on the worst day of their lives, handing them their own file numbers and telling them the thing no one ever told me: however much you trust the people helping you, ask the questions anyway.

Trust is a good thing.