That? It is a picture I took at Amir’s graduation ceremony, when we first discovered that he was missing. We got to the auditorium early, to get good seats—we had very good seats, in the third row on the right side of the stage.

I first noticed Amir was missing when I saw he wasn’t seated in the front row. He should have been in the front row—according to the program, seating was alphabetical. Amir Azadi. Soraya and my husband both said it had to be some kind of mistake, that he must have gotten seated somewhere in the sea of other kids, but I knew something was wrong. Blame it on my maternal instinct. I’d lost my son one time before, at Disney World, and I felt the same stomach-churning I had felt then. He had wandered off back then, Amir, on some kind of necessary adventure. When we found him, he was in a minor brawl with Goofy. He had really angered the man in the Goofy costume; apparently, Amir had punched him in the nose. He was only five. It was a misunderstanding.

I looked for Amir in the crowd of students. I looked for his face in the ocean of red caps and gowns. Nothing.

I texted Amir. Many times. Outside the auditorium, we were surrounded by caps and gowns, all the families snapping photos like paparazzi. It hadn’t hit me yet that we wouldn’t get to take photos like that with our son.

During the ceremony, a tall, wiry boy kept looking our way. He would approach us and then back away, almost like he wanted to talk to us. He had very messy hair. I remember thinking, This boy’s mother needs to get him to a barber. He had looked quite nervous.

Maybe you should talk to him, Officer?

Interrogation Room 38

Soraya

FU—FREAKING JAKE. I’m sorry. I don’t usually cuss. But if I’d known who he was that day, I would have kicked him right in the balls. Yes, Mom, that was Jake. And I hate him even more now, knowing that he almost talked to us on graduation day.

Amir didn’t have any friends at his new school, as far as we knew, so we called Lexa and Arun, his best friends from Maryland, to see if they’d heard from him. They told us Amir hadn’t contacted them. In fact, they said he’d gone kind of radio silent on them after Thanksgiving, right when Amir started—well, I’ll get to that. Apparently, they had tried reaching out to Amir a few weeks before graduation. They hadn’t heard anything from him about college, and they remembered how much he always wanted to go to college in New York. They said it was an awkward FaceTime call. Amir was moody. They said he didn’t really want to talk about his future at all.

That really worried my parents. We checked his room and there was nothing. No note. But then Mom went and checked his drawers, and she noticed a bunch of underwear and shirts were missing. He’d gone somewhere. We called his cell phone, but it kept going straight to voicemail. That really worried my parents. Where had he gone?