“Lou, please. You’re a big girl. You have to walk by yourself.”

I spoke softly but tried to inject a kind of authority between the words. That didn’t work, either.

That’s how I ended up putting to use all the tricks I knew. I didn’t have all that many of them.

First I begged.

“Lou, please, sweetie, please calm down and start walking.”

Then I commanded.

“Lou. That will do. I can’t carry you. Now you must come.”

Then I threatened her.

“If you don’t come now, you won’t get any dinner. I will eat your dinner. I will eat everything.”

She would have to go to bed hungry, I said. She would get very hungry. No dinner if she didn’t pull herself together, behave like a big girl. Stop acting like a crybaby.

And finally I tried bribing her again.

“If you start walking properly now, you will have your dinner. Mine too, along with your own.”

But nothing worked. Finally I pulled her up onto my back, just as she wanted. Her legs curled around my waist—she was far too tall.

“Here I go, carrying you,” I said, “just because you have a tiny splinter in your finger.”

“It’s not in my finger,” she fretted. “It’s in my hand.”

And I kept carrying her. She was a sack on my back, heavy and shapeless. And horribly sweaty, hot, and dirty. While she whimpered and whined.

The sound was killing me. No, it could drive me to commit murder.

Nasal wheezing, uhuuhuuhuu . . . uhuhu . . . uhuuhu . . .

She hadn’t been this way for weeks. Months. She hadn’t behaved like this on a single occasion since people started fleeing from Argelès, since our city and our home had been destroyed.

Like a child.

Chapter Nine

Signe

Finally I can see the ocean meeting the sky. It grows lighter; the sun will soon rise behind me, above the mountains in the east. I keep on, toward open water, waiting for the wind, looking at the meter: the diesel tank is full, I can keep going like this for a long time and in the course of a few hours the wind will help me, for sure.

I take in the sensation of the helm against my hands, the smooth, varnished woodwork. I have to steer manually, there’s not enough wind and it’s too unstable for the self-steering wind vane. There are skerries astern. I set my course for the southwest. Maybe they’ve discovered it by now, what has happened in the harbor, the ice bobbing in the fjord. Maybe they have discovered it and simultaneously noticed that I am gone too. They will quickly understand, certainly—the company, the police, Magnus—but by then it will already be too late. I will already be far out at sea.

The feeling of being underway, that’s the best thing about a boat, knowing that you will get there, but not knowing when. Having a destination but having not yet arrived.