The first story is about a thirteen-year-old boy from San Antonio, Texas, who went to play basketball on a June evening in 1994 and never came home.

His family waited for him.

The police assumed he had run away.

The years passed.

Nobody found him.

The second story is about a French man who spent his adult life becoming other people — who found in impersonation a response to a profound personal need for belonging, and who elevated the practice to a level of sophistication that fooled FBI agents, social workers, and a grieving family for sixteen months.

These two stories met when Frédéric Bourdin identified Nicholas Barclay’s case as an opportunity and made himself into Nicholas Barclay, returning to a family that desperately needed its missing member to come home.