The woman in the ticket house, having assumed she’d have some peace until the three o’clock boat, was eating a mustard sandwich. “Better hurry,” she said through a mouthful and slid the red tickets to Oda.

Oda left Hanne’s suitcase outside the little house and showed the two tickets to the man in the jumpsuit. “One is for my daughter. She’s on her way.” Hanne was still in the car.

The man held up the chain that he would soon reattach to block the way down the ramp.

“Please.” She wanted to tell him Hanne was in the bathroom, but the ticket shack was too small for a bathroom. “Her father’s dead,” Oda said.

The man lowered the hand with the chain. Its fat links clanked against each other. She was ashamed to meet the man’s eye but she had to if she wanted her daughter to make the boat.

“That’s hard.”

A horn blew. A younger man up in a small window of the control room was pointing and exclaiming something you couldn’t hear through the glass.

“You get on the boat now. Find a seat inside where she can’t see you.” He had a Low Saxon accent she could understand, but just barely. “She’ll come when you do.”

There were a few plastic seats, a bench, and a series of windows streaked with salt. She was the only passenger inside. Everyone else was either standing in the space in front of the truck or up the stairs on the small deck. Oda put her suitcase with the others by the door and sat on the bench.

The horn blew again, angrier. A metal crank hissed and thudded. She leapt up and looked out the doorway. The ramp was rising off the stern. A jolt, and the boat pulled away from land in a rush of white foam. Hanne’s suitcase was still outside the ticket shack.

“Mutti! Look up!”

Her thin arms were waving with others on the deck above.

“Don’t lean over so far,” Oda said, but it wasn’t what she meant.

A few miles out and the sky lowered and the sea rose and there seemed barely enough room for the ferry to squeeze through the two planes of solid gray. People on the upper deck got cold and came inside. But not Hanne.

When the island came into view, a dark slanted veil hung over it. Oda pressed her forehead against one of the windows. Nowhere else in this wide span of the North Sea was it raining.

She would make Hanne tell the person in the ticket house on the island (Oda pictured the woman eating a mustard sandwich, though she knew of course it would not be the same person) about the suitcase and arrange to have it brought over. She would make Hanne pay for it out of her small allowance. She would not be soft about it.