He slept in Nicholas’s room.

He met Nicholas’s friends.

He spoke with Nicholas’s mother.

Social workers, police officers, a federal agent: they all met him, interacted with him, and largely accepted him.

He was not Nicholas Barclay.

He was Frédéric Bourdin, a twenty-three-year-old French citizen who had spent years perfecting the art of becoming other people.

A man with a history of impersonating missing and abandoned teenagers across Europe, who had found in the Barclay family’s grief and desperation an opportunity he was not willing to pass up.

And he almost got away with it.

Nicholas Barclay: Before The Disappearance

Nicholas Patrick Barclay was born in 1980 and grew up in circumstances that were difficult from the beginning.

His family lived in a mobile home park in San Antonio, Texas — a neighborhood far from the comfortable middle-class suburbs that dominate people’s mental images of American childhood.

His father was largely absent.

His mother, Beverly Dollarhide, worked night shifts and struggled to maintain stability.

His older half-brother Jason had his own problems.