My fingertips drum the steering wheel while I wait for the temporary traffic lights to change to green, the rain hammering against the roof of the car, windscreen wipers lurching from side to side. It isn’t the crack of lightning that causes my stomach to painfully clench, or the rumble of thunder – even though storms always take me back to the time I’d rather forget – but a mother’s instinct.

I’ve felt it before. That bowling ball of dread hurtling towards me.

Remembering what happened last time, I draw in a juddering breath. Tell myself everything is fine. It’s only natural that worry gnaws at me with sharpened teeth. Teenage boys are disappearing from our small town with alarming regularity and every mother is on high alert.

But I have more reason to worry than most.

Next to me, Kieron sleeps. His head lolling against the window, breath misting the glass. The dark sweep of his lashes spider across his pale skin. The hospital visit has exhausted him. The red tartan blanket I always keep in the car has slipped from his knees and I reach across and pull it over his legs. The passenger seat is swallowing his thin body. At thirteen he should be growing but his illness is shrinking him. It’s shrinking me. Sometimes I feel as though my entire family is disappearing. Aidan barely talks to me, never touches me. In bed there’s a cold space between us. Both of us teetering on our respective edges of the mattress, a strip of cold sheet an invisible barrier between us. My head no longer resting on his chest, his leg slung over mine, his fingers stroking my hair.

Connor is monosyllabic and moody in the way that seventeen-year-olds often are but he never was, before …

But it isn’t just that, it’s also this sickness that isn’t just Kieron’s. It’s everybody’s.

The lights change to green.

Hurry.

Before I can pull away there’s a streak of yellow and through the rain I see a digger trundling towards me, blocking my path.

Kieron sighs in his sleep the way his brother sighs when he’s awake. Sometimes I feel the boys only communicate through a series of noises and shrugs. But that’s unfair. It’s hardly surprising Connor’s mouth is a permanent thin line as though he’s forgotten how to smile. It’s not his concern about his brother, on top of everything he went through before the summer, that has turned my sweet-natured son into a mass of guilt and unhappiness but the sharp truth that out of his friendship group of three, two of them have disappeared.

The Taken, the local paper called them, and although they didn’t directly point out that out of the three who were there that tragic day, Connor is the only one left; they didn’t have to.

He knows this as he hides in his room, too scared to go to school.

We all know this.

Tyler and Ryan have vanished without a trace and the police have no idea why. It’s up to me to keep Connor safe.