I was wrong. His puzzle had twenty-four pieces. It was his first one of that size and he was proud of it. Before, he explained with imperturbable seriousness, he’d just had baby puzzles that were too easy; and so the week before he’d asked his mother to buy him one that was really hard.

“At first I couldn’t do it but now I’m pretty good . . . Want to try it with me? You have to find the pieces that go ­together.”

I hadn’t put together a puzzle for at least thirty years. I remembered the 1000-piece Big Ben we’d had when I was little—the only one my parents ever owned, which they assembled every autumn when the bad weather started—it depicted an autumnal scene that my mother found particularly difficult: a black and white dog holding a partridge in its mouth in a wildly coloured forest. How I’d hated those bits of cardboard that lay on the dining room table all week long, which we had to push out of the way at every meal so they wouldn’t end up in our plates . . . I could see my father and mother bending over the table, cursing the pieces that looked too much alike and the same colours that appeared all through the picture. What a nightmare for a child who’s not allowed to join the adults, though he’s sure he could help them.

Sébastien stopped in mid-puzzle.

“How come you aren’t playing? Don’t you know how?”

His father shouted from my office, where he was putting away the boy’s things:

“Sébastien, leave Jean-Marc alone! He doesn’t have to play with you, he’s not a child!”

I protested because it seemed like the thing to do, but I confess I didn’t have the slightest desire to go on playing.