I let an elderly homeless man sleep on my covered porch during a brutal summer storm. By sunrise, he was gone. But when I lifted the blanket he had carefully folded beside my front door, I found something hidden beneath the doormat with my name written across it.

What she did know — and she told me this leaning on a counter, and then had to stop for a minute — was that he had come in on the Friday morning, about an hour after I did.

He bought a coffee. One. The way he always did.

And he told her he had changed his mind about the Saturday and was going to leave it a while, and she had said something about how he had been going on about that bus for months.

And he said it was fine. He said he would get it in the autumn.

Gilda says he was perfectly cheerful about it. She says he bought the coffee and said something about the weather clearing and went off up the road.

He has not been into that shop since. Eleven weeks.

I have spent eleven weeks on this since.

I want to say that plainly, and I want to say immediately afterwards that it does not make up for nine days, because it does not, and four people have told me it does and all four of them are wrong.

I have been to four shelters. Two of them twice.

I have rung the county office. I have left my number with Gilda, with two outreach workers, and with a man at the bus depot who thinks he remembers a face and is not sure.

I have walked that neighbourhood at six in the morning about eleven times.

I have not found Abner Doyle.

The surname came from an outreach worker in the sixth week, off a list from 2021, with four other names on the same page.

That is all it came with. A surname and a year.

But the town came from the note. He named it in that fourth line without meaning to tell me anything — because he was explaining about the bus.

And in the ninth week I found Roseanne.

She is fifty-one. She lives in that town, four hours away, and she has been looking for her father since 2021.

She had four addresses that had all stopped being addresses.

She had rung every shelter in two counties. She had a file. She had been told, twice, by people who meant well, that after four years she should probably start accepting what had most likely happened.

She had stopped telling people she was still looking, because of the particular face they make.