“I’m happy to see what I can do, but it’s not something I can solve right here and now. What’s the image that you want to buy?” Sara ignored the insistent request to enter her access code and clicked on the image gallery. A black-and-white photo of a doll appeared, but the picture was less than half an inch square, and she couldn’t expand it. “Is it this one?”

Esther leaned closer.

“I don’t think so. Try scrolling through.”

Sara advanced to the next picture, and they both leaned in closer to the screen.

“Maybe it’s that one?” Esther asked.

“Was it a doll without clothes on?” Sara kept going.

“I don’t think they were that small when I looked at them at the library,” Esther said, somewhat apologetically.

“I may be able to get through the security and get in touch with the page. It’ll just take me some time.” Sara advanced to the next picture. “Is that it? No, that’s not a doll.”

Esther’s fine wrinkles contracted, making her cheeks look like dumplings.

“But,” she protested, “what is that?”

Sara squinted and said, “I think it looks like a stuffed bird.”

JEPPE POURED BOILING water into his cup of instant noodles, accompanied by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, who were singing their hymn to the broken heart in his head.

“When love goes wrong, nothing goes right.”

Some people have good self-care instincts. They observe regular mealtimes, and make sure they have ironed shirts and clean sheets, whether they’re in a relationship or alone, happy or sad. Other people eat instant noodles full of MSG standing at a kitchen counter whose top should have been replaced a year ago while telling themselves that they knew from the start it wouldn’t work out. As if there was comfort in having predicted the failure of their love.

Being Sara’s boyfriend wasn’t easy, and not just because of the kids. She was difficult to connect with and quick to shut him out, critical, perfectionistic, sometimes downright prejudiced. But she was also wild and fun and beautiful and razor-sharp, and who the hell falls in love with easy? The people we desire can be difficult and complicated, they just need to be worth the trouble. She was.

Jeppe set aside his noodles and contemplated for the one hundred and seventeenth time today whether there was a way to get through the conflict. One cannot just sail off into the blue and lie down to die every time life bared its teeth. But no matter how he tried to look at the issue, he ended up in the same spot: between a bear cub and its mother.