He felt the silence then. It was the floating silence from the road in Syria, total and white. He checked the bathroom. He checked under the bed. He checked the master bedroom and the guest room and the living room and the kitchen, faster and faster, and Claire was beside him now, saying the boy's name, and he was halfway to the garage door, his mind already in the street, at the retention pond behind the subdivision, at the road. Then he heard it, faint, from the hall closet upstairs. A sniff. The small wet hitch of a child trying very hard to cry without making a sound.
Owen was on the floor of the linen closet, wedged behind the vacuum cleaner with his knees drawn up inside the green hoodie and the hood pulled down to his eyebrows. He had a flashlight, the big yellow one from the garage, and the treasure box was in his lap. He had taken out the photograph and the coin and was holding them, one in each hand, and when the closet door opened and the hall light fell on him he flinched and held them tighter, as if someone had come to take them away.
Daniel got down on the floor. There wasn't room. He folded himself into the doorway of the closet with his knees up against the shelf of towels, and Claire knelt in the hall behind him, and for a while nobody did anything.
Then Owen told them, between those terrible quiet hitches, that it was his fault.