And now the danger had my son inside it, in a house I couldn’t reach, in a city I couldn’t get to without being seen, and I could not put myself between them.

I could only sit in a basement and hold a phone and wait, which is to say I could do the one thing a mother’s entire being is built to refuse, which is nothing.

I have talked since to other parents who have waited like that — beside a hospital bed, by a phone, through a search — and we all describe it the same way: not as fear, exactly, though it is terrifying, but as a kind of violence done to your deepest instinct, the instinct to interpose yourself, thwarted and left with nowhere to go.

It turns inward and eats you.

The only thing that kept me from being eaten alive was Harlan’s voice on the phone, and the knowledge that my stillness was, itself, a form of protection — that this once, doing nothing was how I stood between my son and harm.

“Staying calm is what keeps you both alive right now,” he said.