Everyone in Econlockhatchee always said Mr. Kostyk was a little cracked. When the Ewerikes arrived, everyone said the same about Fidelis Ewerike. One night 276 schoolgirls were taken from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria, and he was never the same again. Even in America, far from his homeland, his dreams became a menace. In daylight, he could be less afraid. To prove it, he would playact merriment—shrill laughter, song, dance—at such a frenzied pitch that there was a thrill in senility; by night he would walk.

Like all men, he had been taught that girls are trouble. For some, trouble leads to desire. And so, in a way, he did not quite blame the men for the attack. He blamed the girls, but not for their beauty or innocence or their just-budded breasts. In the photographs, he looked past their uniformity—their youth, the dusk and navy cloths draped from head to toe—and into their faces. Each night as he walked, it was the complicated stillness of these nameless girls’ expressions that haunted him.

Looking at them looking at him—in the photograph, on the television, on the websites, and, at last, in his nightmares—was like his past, his present, and his future had aligned, and here he was caught unawares in its flush light. When she had first seen the girls in the news, his wife, Adaobi, had wept, pulling their daughter, Amarachi, into her embrace; his son, Chukwudiegwu, had only sighed. Fidelis walked.

He did not feel pity, not exactly, not even empathy, for the schoolgirls; instead, there was something useless and angry inside him that urged him to pluck them from a part of the world that he had once, long ago, called home, and place them within his protection. He did not yet know that one can confuse protection with possession.