A nine-year-old does not simply vanish from a wedding she has been practicing for.

I began to move faster.

And I noticed, even in the rising worry, a small wrong note that I could not yet place.

Everyone I asked was pleasant, and helpful, and slightly too quick to reassure me that she was surely just off somewhere getting her picture taken.

But no one had actually seen her.

In a lodge full of people who had spent the morning admiring the sweet flower girl in her pale-blue dress, not one person could tell me where she had gone in the last half hour, as though she had simply been erased from the afternoon.

I did not understand it then.