“This is the Musée de l’Orangerie,” the policeman said. “Impressionist paintings are in there. Monet’s Water Lilies.”

“Can we look in there?” I asked.

Meg looked at the building, then at me, and nodded. It apparently made sense to her that Sarah would wander into a museum.

I was convinced, hopeful, that we would find Sarah sitting on a bench in front of a Cézanne or a Matisse, and she despised Matisse, and that that would be the end of it. Neither the two old women at the reception desk nor the security guard had seen a girl matching Sarah’s description, but they invited us in to look. The tense walk through the giant oval halls of the Water Lilies searching for my child was surreal; the light was surreal, and so, I suppose to distract myself, I observed that irony of that surreality against the huge impressionistic murals. A swing through the rooms yielded no daughter, no evidence that she or anyone like her had been there.

Meg was too far into shock to cry, but I might have been. The fact was, I was angry, perhaps at myself, I didn’t know. The anger manifested in my snapping at the nice young policeman.

“So, what are you people doing?” I asked. “Our child is lost out here somewhere. What are you doing? Where are the other policemen?”

“We will find her,” he said.

“You keep saying that.”

Meg took my hand. More as an expression of fear than to calm me down, though her touch had that effect.

The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1563, Pado Caliari. “It’s so big,” Sarah remarked about the canvas. Parked beside me on the bench in front of it, she was staring, she told me, at the dogs in the foreground and the cerulean of the sky behind. The halo looked fake, as, of course, it was.

We crossed the busy street on our way to the river. I couldn’t imagine my Sarah alone in the middle of that traffic. On the other side we walked down the stone stairs to the wide path along the Seine. The sight of the dark water caused my breathing to catch in my chest or throat, my mouth. I realized that my fear was keeping me from searching. I began to try to study the faces along the bank, but I couldn’t resist looking at the river.

“What are you looking at?” Meg asked me.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know why I was thinking I would see Sarah in the water, but I thought just that.

The policeman’s radio crackled. He stepped away, listened, talked, came back. “We have found your daughter.”

“Thank God,” Meg said.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Near where you saw her last,” he said. “I will take you back there.”

“Thank you,” Meg said.

We climbed the stairs back up to street level and found the lane filled with protesters carrying signs and chanting. “Dieu dit non!” they shouted. “Dieu dit non!”