When AtNight came into Sebastian’s case in August 2024, the request was painfully simple: help a father find his son. Nothing that followed was simple. We expected the work to involve searching for information. Most of our time was actually spent figuring out whether the information arriving every day deserved to be believed. That difference became the whole job. Anyone who worked this case knows the feeling. A message comes in late at night and your heart starts moving before your mind has caught up. There is a photograph, a vehicle, a person who swears they saw him, or a detail that seems to fit something you read weeks earlier. You call somebody. Another person wakes up. Laptops open. Maps come back onto screens. For an hour, perhaps longer, the whole case feels alive in a new way. Then you locate the original photograph and discover that it is old. The timestamp is wrong. The vehicle is a different model. The supposed witnesses all heard the story from the same person. What looked like five confirmations becomes one unverified statement passed around until nobody remembers where it began. Nobody celebrates when that happens. You make the note, close the lead and sit there for a minute before opening the next one. That was the roller coaster. Hope never arrived gently. It came crashing through the door, made everybody believe the night might end differently, and sometimes disappeared before sunrise. There were periods when we honestly felt close to something. There were also days when the archive grew by hundreds of files and we understood Sebastian’s disappearance no better than we had the day before. That is difficult to explain to anyone who has never worked inside a case like this. A person can spend an entire day doing careful, necessary work and finish with nothing except proof that one more possibility did not happen. The public usually saw the arguments, interviews and personalities surrounding the case. Our view was less dramatic. It was folders full of photographs with no dates, video clips missing the minutes around them, tips that had traveled through several people, maps covered in places someone believed had been searched, and thousands upon thousands of messages written by people who ranged from deeply sincere to completely detached from reality. Behind those files were real people trying to make sense of them. People lost sleep. Families had their evenings interrupted. Food sat untouched beside computers. Somebody would notice one strange word in an old message and send everyone back through material they thought they had finished months earlier. The work changed people. We became more cautious, sometimes more cynical than we wanted to be, and then something genuinely promising would arrive and all of that hope came rushing back anyway. You need hope to continue opening the files. You also need enough discipline to admit when the thing you hoped for is not there. We did not always handle that pressure perfectly. There were bad days. Frustration got into conversations. People defended work they had poured themselves into. Opinions changed as new information arrived. Things that once seemed important became less important; material initially dismissed sometimes deserved another look. That belongs in the story too. AtNight’s account of this case should not read as though we floated above it, calm and correct at every turn. We were in it. We made decisions with the information available at the time. We dealt with the same noise, urgency and emotion that affected everyone else. Any honest review has to be willing to look at us with the same seriousness that it applies to every other person and institution discussed in the record. What stayed constant was Sebastian.