There were still seven minutes to go. Since all the window seats on the platform side of the train were taken, I couldn’t watch out for Dave and Lotte. I had expected them to get in soon after me. I hadn’t seen a special checkpoint anywhere. And yet there was no sign of them.

‘This is the train to Utrecht, isn’t it?’ I asked a woman across from me. Perhaps I hadn’t looked carefully and had boarded the wrong train. But the woman confirmed that it was the train to Utrecht.

‘Utrecht is a nice city,’ she added. ‘Don’t you think so?’

I nodded.

‘Of course, it’s no match for Amsterdam,’ she continued, ‘but I like being there anyway. It has an intimacy that I sometimes miss in Amsterdam.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s true.’ I saw a few passengers still getting in. My brother and his wife were not among them.

‘Besides,’ said the woman across from me, ‘my whole family lives there and of course that makes a difference. Do you have family in Utrecht too?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh, then you must have friends there,’ she said. ‘I do too, very good friends, who used to live in Amsterdam.’

One minute before the train was due to leave my brother entered the compartment. He didn’t sit down and didn’t look at me. He set his bag down next to me and was gone before I could ask him anything. The train started to move immediately afterwards, as if he’d been the one to give the departure signal.

‘Is that your bag?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’d forgotten it.’

‘Nice of that gentleman to bring it to you,’ she said.

We had passed the houses of the eastern part of the city, and the train was now leaving Amsterdam at full speed.

‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘it’s only a hop, skip and a jump. We’ll be there in no time.’

But I thought it took a long time. I had placed the bag on my lap and was staring outside. As we approached Utrecht, I got up and went into the corridor.

‘Have a good time in Utrecht today,’ the woman called after me. Her words stuck in my head when I crossed the square in front of the station. I still heard them as I turned the corner, walked down a broad shopping street and passed a cafeteria that reeked of grease. I paused in front of the window of a shoe shop, feeling so nauseated that I was afraid I was going to throw up. ‘Breathe deeply, that will keep it down where it belongs,’ the nurse in the hospital used to say to me when I was similarly affected during my treatment. I took several deep breaths and that helped.

A moment later I was standing in the doorway of the house where I was supposed to be. ‘It’s above a grocery,’ Dave had told me that morning. The door opened the minute I rang the bell. I started up the stairs. It was a steep staircase with a maroon runner. A tiny light bulb was burning on the first landing. Some of the carpet rods on the flight of stairs had come loose and this flight was even longer and steeper than the first one. I saw a man and a woman standing at the top. They looked at me without saying a word.