Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.

NORTH SEA

Oda’s daughter refused to carry her own suitcase.

“You put too many of your own things in it,” Hanne said.

Oda got out of the car. “I put in a beach towel for each of us and snacks in case they don’t sell anything on the boat. That’s all.”

Hanne remained in her seat. She hadn’t wanted to come, and the sight of the sea as they came down the hill into the village of Harlesiel had not moved her as Oda hoped it would. It had not, in fact, moved Oda either. She hadn’t known she’d expected a lift, a change, until it didn’t happen. But Hanne was young, twelve and a half, and had rarely seen the open sea like this.

Perhaps it was all the clouds racing to hide the sun, great bright globs of them as if blown like glass from a fat straw and shorn flat on the bottom by the wind. They muted the hard blue of the water. They stole the show.

Across the parking lot, a man in a green jumpsuit unhooked a long chain at the start of the ramp and signaled a truck to move forward.

“The ferry does too take cars,” Hanne said. “Look.”

“Just trucks. For construction and such. Get out now. People will be next and I don’t have our tickets yet.”

Hanne did not move. The man in the jumpsuit walked backward in front of the truck, flicking his hand left and right as the truck dipped down the ramp with a clank and onto the boat. It was a tight fit. The man patted the hood of the truck as one would a dog and came back up the ramp. He nodded at the pedestrians.

Oda opened the passenger door and pulled on her daughter’s upper arm. It was so slight in her hand, a slender bone wrapped in skin. She felt how easily she could dislocate it from its shoulder socket. Hanne yanked free.

“All right,” Oda said. “I will carry it from here to the terminal, but you must take it onto the boat yourself.” She put the strap of her purse over her head so it crossed her chest, a style she did not like and associated with women twenty years younger than she was, and lifted the two suitcases. Neither was particularly heavy, but this short walk to the ticket shack required all her energy.

It was their first vacation together, just the two of them. Oda had been saving for it for nearly two years.