“This is your ring,” she said. She tried to hand it to me.

“Non!” I used my hand to shoo her away. “Je ne suis pas intéressé.”

She didn’t just move away from me, she ran.

I looked to my left to find that a policeman had stopped next to me. He asked me if I needed help without opening his mouth, just the tilt of his head.

“Ma fille. Elle a douze ans et est brune. Elle porte un manteau rouge.” I held my hand in the air to indicate her height.

He studied me, nodded, tilted his head as if to tolerate my poor French. “Don’t worry, we will find her,” he said in English. Somehow his French accent was reassuring. He spoke into his radio.

“My wife is waiting by the fountain. Maybe she’s found her.”

“Where is the last place you saw her?” he asked.

I pointed. “A bench over there.”

“What is her name?”

“Sarah. Sarah Wells. She might be a little disoriented. She has a medical condition and can have seizures.” I felt as if I were somehow betraying my daughter by offering that information.

The policeman reported that information into his radio. He looked at me. “She is black? Like you?”

“Oui.”

The policeman and I walked to the bench and continued on toward the fountain. I searched every face, not only to see if it belonged to my daughter, but also searching for any suggestion of knowledge of her, as if there might be a conspiracy. My mind was racing. I felt my hands shaking and I tried to stop them.

“I too have a daughter,” the policeman said. He was looking too, his head moving in sharp microturns, snaps of several degrees at a time. I wondered if that was a real way to search or if he had been taught that in gendarme school, a method to give panicked parents confidence in his efforts. “She is younger than your daughter.”

Another policeman fell into stride with us.

I spotted Meg, hugging herself, turning circles near the fountain. Sarah was not with her. She saw us approaching and stopped turning, shook her head. “There is my wife,” I said.

The new policeman peeled away from us and headed past the fountain toward la place de la Concorde.

“Where did she go?” Meg asked. She sounded angry.

“It’s all my fucking fault,” I said. “I shouldn’t have walked away from her.” I had turned away for only a second, but why even that?

The policeman received a call on his radio, then looked at us. “No, it was something else.”

“Could someone have taken her?” Meg asked.

“She probably just wandered off and became lost in the crowd,” the policeman said. “It is easy to do.”

I thought of the river and grew more afraid. “We should go over and check the Seine,” I said.

We walked that way. That was when I saw the rear side of a long rectangular building. I paused and observed the low hedge surrounding it. “What is this building?” I asked.