But I kept checking, every few months, first on AltaVista and Excite and Yahoo!, then on Google, and I’d click through the results, but there just wasn’t anything there. I got on Friendster and then MySpace and then Facebook, though I never maintained any actual social media, still didn’t even use Twitter or Instagram, because I didn’t really want to use them and I didn’t really need to use them. But I’d search for him. Nothing, or nothing that, after just a little more digging, was really him. There was a point, after I’d published the first book, when I had money and I thought I could hire a detective, but it felt wrong, like if Zeke wanted me to find him, he wouldn’t make it so that I needed to involve other people.

Eventually, just searching for Ezekiel Brown finally let me hit some actual possibilities. There was a Benjamin Ezekiel Brown, born in the same year as Zeke, and Memphis had been listed in some pay-to-play sites that offered arrest records and felt very much like a scam. He might have been in Knoxville for a little while. I sometimes found hits connected to an address in North Carolina. But nothing I could pin down. Ben Brown was not an easy name to search. When his grandmother died after she moved into a nursing home in Nashville, I didn’t know until months later, after visiting my mom, and no newspaper even had an obituary for her. I gave up. Or, no, I always searched, but then I stopped when it felt like that next step was necessary, to actually reach out, to call a random number and hope it was him. To hear his voice as an adult, to hear something in it that let me know it was Zeke, I couldn’t make myself do it. I was waiting for him to tell me that he was ready to talk. But he never wanted to talk, I guess. He never wanted me to find him. And now I had to. Because, if I told Mazzy everything, someone would find him. And it felt so cruel to do that to him, to have someone else tell him that they knew the secret. It had to be me, no one else in the world but me.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I SET MYSELF UP IN MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM, which my mom had turned into a showroom for her sneakers, all these IKEA wall shelves, these shoes in neon green and void-of-space black and the kind of white that would instantly smudge if you applied even the slightest pressure from your fingertip. In the closet, I looked at the baseboard, this little opening, and there was one of my folded-up posters stuffed in there, the paper yellowed, and I let it stay there, a magical protection for my mom.