“Hello,” she said in return. Her eyes dipped down to his duffle bag. He took it off his shoulder, lowered it to the deck, and watched the wake the boat was making. Foam chucked out to the sides, and the moonlight played on that, too, making little glimmering kisses of it. The wind blew against Leland so he had to lean into it and the rail, just to stay upright. The ocean looked infinite.

“It’s pretty,” he said.

She nodded, looking over the ocean now as if determining that he had not in fact lied.

He wanted to tell her she was pretty. “I,” he said, “I have to just say …” And there was a catch in his throat that stopped him. “When we were over there, I got a dog.” He was ready to be teased, so he said, “A pure-blooded shepherd.”

“A dog,” the girl said. She was so serious Leland didn’t know how to react.

“Yeah,” he said. “She just, well, she died a few minutes ago,” and the words sounded strange in his ears, the wind sweeping around him, and he hoped she was going to prove him wrong. Maybe she knew about dogs. If Nanette were all right, he could think instead about whether this girl was pretty, or if she liked him. Instead, he followed her dark, lucid eyes as they lowered to his duffle bag, and he nodded when they looked back at him. “I can’t bring a dead dog back to the States,” he said, hoping he sounded at least a small bit gruff.

She fell to one knee and put her hand on the bag. “Was she a good dog?”

Leland said, “The best,” and he looked toward the lifeboats. “She could do tricks.” And he was about to say that she could jump from airplane to airplane, and uncork a pineapple, and that he’d hoped to take her to make his fortune in the movies, but all of that sounded pathetic, and the crushable hopes he’d had made him fall silent, and then he hefted the bag up to the railing.

“Wait,” said the girl. “We can say something about her first.”

Fifty feet below them, the water churned, and Leland was eager for the moment when he would be walking away. “Sure.”

The girl paused. “What happened to her?”

“She got sick,” he said. “She wasn’t that strong.”

“Those that He makes perfect, He makes fragile.”

“Yeah,” Leland said, feeling a thud in his heart. “Is that from the Bible?”

She shrugged. “My uncle says it when things go wrong.”

“Oh.” He wished he’d gone toward the music on the foredeck. They could have played “Sweet Briar” for her. But there was no music back here. Nanette would have an imperfect service.

He tried to think of some final words, but his mind was jumbled and tired. “I had this idea,” he said, then faltered.

“You wanted to be happy?” she asked.