I’ve stayed with Dad and Malcolm for two days now so maybe I won’t be able to time-travel anymore anyway. Malcolm wanted to go to the Jewish Museum and do more research, but I needed a break.

“Can we do one single ordinary, fun thing this trip?” I begged.

“We went to Notre Dame!” Malcolm said.

“Yeah, and look what that started. C’mon, Dad, please. You wanted to take photos of the Eiffel Tower, didn’t you? Can we go there?”

“Great idea,” Dad agreed. “We can go to the Jewish Museum afterward. Okay, Malcolm?”

So we both got what we wanted. It was a clear, sunny day with a brilliant blue sky, the perfect day for Dad to take pictures. After seeing the Eiffel Tower when it was new, it was funny to see it the modern way, like the backdrop for every movie you’ve ever seen about Paris. A long line of people snaked around the base, waiting to take the elevator to the top.

“I’ll stand in line while you take pictures so by the time you’re done, we’ll be near the front,” Malcolm offered.

“Good idea,” Dad said. “You want to wait with him?” he asked me.

“After I look around.”

“You’re not fooling anybody,” Malcolm teased. “You’re going to draw, aren’t you? You think we don’t notice that sketchbook you carry everywhere?”

“It’s just for notes and doodling,” I insisted, “So I’ll remember stuff. Anyway who wants to rush to stand in a line? That’s your job.”

Malcolm stuck out his tongue, but I knew he really didn’t mind. He found crowds entertaining. He loved to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations and imagine what their lives were like, so long lines didn’t grate on him the way they did on most people.

I tilted my head back, staring into the steel girders crisscrossing their way to the top. Degas saw you being built, I thought. And Claude too. I bet Claude hated me now, after I’d left him just the way he’d begged me not to. I hadn’t said anything about him to Dad and Malcolm because really he wasn’t part of my job. He was an incidental detail. But a detail that had almost kissed me, and looking up at the Tower, feeling a warm breeze play with my hair, I could almost imagine him standing next to me, his hand gentle on my back.

I threaded my way through the crowds where men hawked flapping toys, squeaking toys, and squishy blobs for toys. There were dozens of different vendors, and they all had the same cheap trinkets, including, of course, bucket-loads of mini Eiffel Towers of every size from key chain to statuette. I definitely wasn’t in nineteenth-century Paris anymore. It was more like twenty-first-century Disneyland.

Trying to avoid the man bellowing, “Get your picture taken holding up the Eiffel Tower,” I walked behind one of the massive piers. Almost hidden by bushes, there was a brick pillar that looked like an old chimney. It was like a sliver of the nineteenth century in the midst of everything else. A strange throbbing pulsed from it, a weird magnetic pull. Was that what a touchstone felt like? I wondered. Was I finally learning how to recognize one?

I pushed aside a branch, reached into the darkness, and touched the cool stone. A sharp jolt went through me as the seasons furled past, the days and nights wheeled around me, and the mist cleared.

The crowds were gone. So were Dad and Malcolm. I took a deep breath and smelled the nineteenth century.