My brother vanished on the night of his prom—23 years later, I spotted someone who looked exactly like him 3,000 miles from home.

banged shut behind him the way it always did.

He walked to his car, a secondhand Honda he’d bought himself with two summers of lawn-mowing money, and pulled out of the driveway with his date already waiting two streets over.

He never came back.

I won’t walk through every detail of what followed because I have lived through those details for 23 years and continue reading …