“I do,” said Emerson.

Lucy began to tune out Emerson’s voice and those of the other group members who asked the detective questions.

She fused her fists into one, ten-fingered, white-knuckled knot and continued to press down on her lap. The pressure was a distraction at this point, and that was good, that was fine, because as long as she remained distracted she—

—turns around for only a few seconds, maybe ten, maybe twenty, but it isn’t that long, Sarah right next to her, holding her hand, and Lucy doesn’t think twice when Sarah says, “I need my hand, Mommy,” so she lets go of her daughter’s—

—hand came up slowly and began rubbing her temple; stop it, she thought, just stop it, don’t think about it, keep yourself distracted, keep that distance and you won’t—

—go?” she says to the woman she’s been talking with.

The other woman looks over Lucy’s shoulder; her eyes narrow and her brow wrinkles with confusion. “I don’t know, Lucy, she was right there a second ago.”

Lucy turns and shouts Sarah’s name—it has only been a few seconds, that’s all, so she can’t have gone far—but when her call goes unanswered the first thing she feels is irritation at her daughter’s running off like this; okay, sure, it’s a small parking-lot carnival and kids love these things (Lucy loves them herself, there’s something so sad and tacky about them but all the kids see are the rides and the games and the candy and fun fun fun) and anyone who thinks they can keep a child standing still for more than a minute at one of these things deserves the sore feet and headaches they’ll get, but Sarah—who, at age I’m-practically-six, is already a parking-lot carnival veteran of some two dozen excursions—knows better than to do something like this, Lucy had told her she only wanted to stop and talk to Mrs. Shaw for a second and Sarah said, “‘Kay,” and went back to playing with her balloon and that hand-sized wooden rocking horse she’d won at the bottle-toss booth while Lucy asked Mrs. Shaw about the new teacher at Sarah’s pre-school, Mr. Kessler, and Mrs. Shaw, who was in charge of the pre-school, held tight to her six-year-old son’s hand and said that Mr. Kessler came to them with exceptional references and the kids all seemed to like him, why, even Sarah had remarked that he was more fun than most grownups, and that’s when Lucy turns around and finds herself facing a huge, cold, and frighteningly empty space where her daughter had been only twenty or so seconds before, so now she’s walking away from Mrs. Shaw without saying so much as “Excuse me,” because the irritation is giving way to anger and she knows that the anger is only a whitewash over the terror that she feels rising from her gut, and she’s calling Sarah’s name again, much more loudly this time, and doesn’t hear the note of hysteria that’s creeping into her voice until Mrs. Shaw comes up behind her and grabs her arm and says, “It’ll be all right, Lucy, come on, we’ll keep looking on our way over to the security officer—see, he’s right over there?—and we’ll find her, don’t worry, this isn’t a big carnival, she can’t have wandered far,” but there’s something in Mrs. Shaw’s voice that’s a just a little too controlled, and like an instantaneous explosion in Lucy’s brain the music from the carousel is just a little too loud, the twinkling lights over the game booths are far too bright—blasts of aura-light before a really bad migraine—and the smells from the food vendors and cotton-candy machines are taking on a rancid quality as she breathes them in and it seems like it’s taking forever to get to the security guard, but then he turns and looks at them and that’s when Lucy realizes that she’s still shouting her daughter’s name, and for a second, only for a second, just one, that’s all, her shouts become the scream of a million babies doused in gasoline and set aflame because now a bunch of people are looking at them and she forces herself to swallow it back, to bite down hard, to pull it all into a tight knot that will come gloriously loose when she finally holds Sarah in her arms again but then Mrs.