But Esther hadn’t planned to become a missing person. She just wanted a break, and had taken herself somewhere else to get some space. “In my eyes, people were missing from me,” she told me last summer. “I’d removed myself from everything, to try to push the world away.” About 180,000 people are reported missing in the UK every year, a number that is believed to be a significant underestimate. Among them are the individual stories that capture our collective, horrified attention: the people taken and harmed, or whose vanishing seems immediately to speak to something wider than the facts of the case alone, like the disappearance and death of Sarah Everard in March. But there are innumerable reasons why a person might go missing. It is often, consciously or not, an attempt to exercise control in a life where things have started to slip. This control, however, is often illusory; when an online appeal springs up, a missing person’s image is circulated far and wide across social media, with any context and complexity to their story often stripped away.