Licia, you know what you have to do, I thought. You know, because we taught you right from wrong.

But the camera turned toward the center of town.

Standing in front of Oslo town hall was a large white van. With a vertiginous lurch I realized this mooring had been chosen with care. From here the town hall almost filled the frame. Two tiny black-clad figures were walking briskly away toward a small white car.

I thought of the men who must have chosen to place my daughter here, in this boat, so close to the epicenter of the coming explosion, and I was filled with rage.

The white car was driving away. In that car, I guessed, were John and Paul Andersen. And on the shoreline there were people.

Licia looked down at her watch. A counter. Seventeen seconds.

She looked up. At all those people whose lives they were about to change. Who did not yet know.

She was at the port side of the boat, loosening the mooring line. Compensating, I guessed, for the coming surge. The movement was practiced; natural; rehearsed. She raised her wrist, looked down at her watch. Nine seconds. Now eight.

The camera panned around. The boy had stopped; he stood unsteadily at the water’s edge, then hunkered down, watching his dog as it swam, facing away from the town hall. He did not see the white van; he did not see his mother, running full-tilt toward him along the pontoon.

The camera swung toward the town.

Licia raised her watch.

Five seconds.

The only sound the mother’s frenzied footfalls.

Everything else was still.

The van disappeared.

Was there a flash? Hard to be sure. The van was there. Then it was not.

For a moment nothing else changed. The town hall looked peaceful, solid. Then the entire facade seemed to sway forward. It crumpled. It folded in on itself, silent in the summer sun. Bricks fell like rain. Smoke billowed from the empty space inside, curled across the piers in huge enveloping waves.

At the end of the next dock the mother scooped her child into her arms. She had not seen the explosion. She did not yet know.

The air tightened. The surface of the water grew opaque. The boat lifted, as Licia must have known it would when she loosened her mooring rope.

And now the gathering roar, like a world ending. The pontoons lifted from the water. Ropes strained upward; boats pulled hard against their fenders, groaned against the metal of the mooring spars.

Licia turned again. I saw the boy and his mother, frozen, as the blast from the bomb reverberated across the fjord. Such stress in that child’s sinews. Did my daughter feel a stab of regret at the terror she had visited upon this woman and her tiny son?

The pontoon dropped gently back into place. The water became still.