Isabelle is on her knees on a cushion up in the bow, her face tilted into the wind. Her hair has come unfastened and lashes salty and yellow around her head. She is wearing only a bathing suit, which is all she ever wears in summer. This one is striped in different shades of blue. Every now and then Wilson can hear snatches of Isabelle’s voice carried backward on the wind past his ears; she is singing a song he cannot make out, but still, she is singing, and this, and the sun, and the boat’s breeze, and the rumble of the motor spreading all throughout his body soothe him.

Then, suddenly, the motor stops. Wilson’s body tingles with the memory of the sound, and the new silence rings loudly in his ears. Ruth is gone. Isabelle is gone. The boat, the sea, the sun: all of it is gone. Wilson opens his eyes. One gloved hand pulls an electric toothbrush from his mouth while the other uses a straw to vacuum up the toothpaste and saliva collected beneath his tongue. Wilson blinks.

“Okay,” the hygienist says. “You can go ahead and rinse and spit, and then Dr. Falco will be in to see you and schedule a time to fill those cavities.”

“We’re done?” Wilson says. He can’t hide the disappointment in his voice.

“We’re done.”

On the way home from the shoe store, and from Bloomingdale’s after that, they stop at the vet to pick up Maggie, whose early release Wilson evidently arranged despite his reluctance this morning, as Ruth learned when she had called earlier to arrange for it herself. She glances at her daughter, who is clutching Maggie’s leash with two hands, pausing whenever the dog finds a place to sniff, which is nearly all the time.

We’re never going to get home at this rate! she wants to say, but she does not want to transform the calm, contented look on Isabelle’s face back into the dark, awful scowl she wore at the shoe store, and then at Bloomingdale’s, where every Christmas dress Ruth suggested Isabelle try on was surveyed with a skeptical frown. Ruth pictures with annoyance last year’s Christmas dress, which she had, as she does every year, sent as a hand-me-down to Wilson’s niece, assuming that by this Christmas Isabelle would have outgrown it. She ought to have outgrown it, Ruth thinks, but then again, when it comes to Isabelle “ought” means nothing.

“Shit,” Ruth mutters, feeling the slushy water of the puddle she hadn’t noticed seep into her shoe. “Goddammit.” She looks down at her feet with irritation, and then at Isabelle and Maggie, who have paused just behind her. Maggie is intent on a shoveled mound of snow, and Isabelle has bent down to tie the laces of her new boot, which have come undone and are wet from dragging through the slush.