I reassured him she was okay.
Far from accusing him of being a drama queen I understood why his panic threshold was a lot lower than mine.
In South America, kids go missing all the time.
On his street alone, five had disappeared never to be seen again, and two of the girls who frequented the street where I lived in upmarket Buenos Aires went missing one day.
Only one came back. She made it back by jumping out of a car once she'd been travelling for a day or more.
We worked out she'd been probably close to Paraguay, and good-hearted bus drivers handled her like a sweet, but rather battered, parcel until she made it back to the street family that was all she had. She was eight.
The year I left my job teaching in Buenos Aires, a colleague sent me an email saying one of our favourite students had been dumped, shot dead on his parents' doorstep. A kidnapping apparently gone wrong.
It's hard to explain this to anyone who hasn't lived it. An empty playground where you'd just seen your child playing means: a) she's gone to have a look at the plants on the other side of the garden (the kiwi version), or; b) she's been thrown in a car and is now speeding towards the nearest border (the Latin version).
In a country where the biggest worry is a kid's allergies, how do you teach them about stranger danger?
The kidnapping of a Palmerston North new entrant is abhorrent and aberrant in equal measure.
It's not just the horror of the possibility of what could have happened, but that it threatens the very idea of the country we believe we live in.
Years ago now, the local cop called me over after the safety workshop she was running with 5-year-olds.
"Um, I want to talk with you about your girl's understanding of stranger danger."
"Okay," I said.
"I asked what they should do if someone came and offered them a lolly and asked her to get in the car. Your girl said that you should ask them if the lolly has any milk in it."
Allergies? Check. Stranger Danger? You don't even want to go there.
