Beside me, Elsa said something to Vee that I did not catch. I turned toward Vee, who leaned across her mother. “That boy knows things, Dad.” She stared across at Arno. “Bet you anything you want.” Arno returned Vee’s stare, suspicious.

“This isn’t the time, Vee,” I said.

“He should tell us what he knows, Dad.”

Arno’s mother, sensing something, reached out and drew her son close.

“As the man in charge,” the prime minister was saying, “I accept responsibility for what went wrong on that most terrible day.”

Murmurings behind us. Ahead people were nodding, visibly moved.

“But I also accept . . .” He paused dramatically, leaned forward on the lectern. “I also accept responsibility for the things that went well.”

“What?” whispered Dan. “What were the things that went well?”

“Nothing,” said Vee. “Not a single thing.”

The prime minister stopped. Had he heard? His eyes flicked across to our pew. A look of displeasure crossed his features. “We are,” he said, “the most courageous of nations.”

I turned around, expecting to see my family’s disbelief reflected in other faces, but if there was anger it did not show. People sat in rapt attention, tears pouring down their cheeks, as if listening to a different speech. Arno’s mother seemed profoundly moved.

The prime minister looked down at his notes. He pulled at the ends of his cuffs, cleared his throat, drank water from a crystal glass, made himself tall. “You will forgive me, dear friends of Norway, if I continue my speech in the language of our forefathers. Kjære alle sammen . . .”

And so we sat there at the memorial service, surrounded by the families of the dead, as the prime minister promised the television cameras that his country would not change, that he would meet this atrocity with more democracy, more openness. Dan sat beside Vee, holding her hands very tightly. Vee did not cry. None of us did until the final hymn. “To Those in Peril on the Sea,” sung in Norwegian by a choir of two hundred. The deep bass of the organ took hold in our bones, wrenching the emotion from us, while the descants in the choir soared high above, ethereal and timeless.

We cried then, huddled together, my wife, my brother, my daughter, and I, as Franklin gurgled happily on my lap. We cried for Licia, who was yet to come home, and we cried for the lives lost or ruined that day, for those who would not be coming home, and for those who had come home changed. And all the while little Arno sat staring rigidly ahead, saying nothing.

When the service was over we slipped from our pew past the journalists and the camera crews.

“Viktoria! Viktoria Curtis!” one shouted.

Vee turned. A man in a suit was stepping toward her, microphone extended. “Your sister, the hero of Garden Island . . .”

Vee made to speak.

“No, Vee,” I said.

I could see Vee’s confusion.