When you saw yourself on a missing poster.

I lost my little brother Daniel when I was eight years old. He had been in the fenced-in garden one minute and then not there the next. He was four years old. Of course, everyone went crazy trying to find him. The sheriff's office, the cops, my parents, my friends, and my neighbours. At first, everyone said we'd find him within a day, but even at eight o'clock, I could tell they were telling a kind lie. There was no sign of a gate being left open or a fence hole big enough for him to fit through. This meant that someone had taken him, and we couldn't get him back until we knew who it was or they got in touch with us.

By the third day, someone had taken him, and the talk had changed from finding him to waiting for a call from them. They also advertised him in every way they could think of to get his name and picture seen by as many people as possible. For about a week, they pushed the news stations to cover it morning, noon, and night. But as time went on and new stories came in, the daily warning to call if you saw him was pushed to the end of the hour and then disappeared.

My parents were smart, so they knew this was going to happen. They put things on the internet and in TV ads, but the internet wasn't as big and famous back then, and TV ads cost a lot. My mum ran a local print shop, which came in handy because she quickly printed thousands of flyers that we put up all over our part of the state.

That's what we did every day for a year. We would load up and put up flyers in new places…