But it is an explanation that a family desperate to believe — a family that needed this person to be Nicholas — could accept, because accepting it was easier than confronting what the alternative meant.

The accent was another enormous problem.

Bourdin spoke English with an obvious French accent.

Nicholas Barclay was from San Antonio, Texas — he would have spoken with a Texas accent, or at minimum with the neutral American English of someone who had grown up in the United States.

There was no explanation for how three years in captivity could produce a French accent in an American teenager.

Bourdin’s explanation was that his captors had been European, that he had been surrounded by European languages, that his English had been affected by this immersion.