Franklin pushed his dish across the platform of the high chair, over the edge, and onto the floor, where it landed facedown. He sat staring down at it, transfixed. Elsa looked at him, then at me.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I know you met someone at the mall.”

She laughed. “You followed me?”

“Kind of by mistake.”

She turned, looked me very deliberately in the eye. “See, I’m pretty sure I saw you, lurking in the shadows outside.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.” She said it on the inhale.

I said, “Who was the man?”

She sat for a while, as if weighing her options. She gave a tiny grimace.

“Elsa?”

Then she looked me very directly in the eye with her blue-white wolf eyes. “Hedda thinks our policy of honesty doesn’t work in my favor.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?”

But she simply sat there staring at me, refusing to answer my question.

I went out, angry and confused.

I walked into town along the freeway, hands freezing, shoes and trousers stained with salt.

What would Elsa have seen if she had been watching me? That I fell twice on the icy street. That I entered the bar self-conscious and covered in snow. That I sat, talking to a woman on a high stool.

“Where are you from?” the woman said.

“Here,” I said.

She looked at the stain where the snow had soaked into my jacket, amused. “No,” she said. “I really don’t think you are.”

A tall woman with elaborately pinned hair and a short skirt. She remembered me, she said, and I remembered her.

“Okay,” I said. “What was your name again?”

Nina. Her name was Nina. With her open face and her strong thighs.

We retreated to a booth in a dark corner. When I told Nina that I had no friends in this town she reached across and mussed my hair, and although that was a friendly gesture, I suppose it was open to misinterpretation. If my wife had been watching through the plate-glass window she would not have liked it.

Outside the bar, electric cars cut silent paths through the snow.

From the street perhaps it looked as if we were caressing each other’s hands, though, for all my longing, it was innocent and chaste. I did not once look at Nina’s thighs, despite the shortness of her skirt.

The truth is I wanted to talk to someone who didn’t have an opinion about me, who hadn’t seen me on television, and who didn’t know that I was the father of the missing girl. I wanted to flirt and laugh for an hour or two, and for it all to mean nothing. And Nina was kind and funny, and I told her at the start that I was married and loved my wife. And she admired my wedding ring and told me it was beautifully designed, and I in turn admired hers.