“Okay, okay, you win.” Johannes raised his hands in the air, like a white flag of surrender. “Let’s go have some breakfast. I got croissants from the good bakery.”

“First we need to go back into the water.” Jeppe stood up, a drip of sweat falling from his chin to the floor. “Just a quick dip.”

“No way! I’ll die if I have to go into that freezing ocean again.”

“A little dying won’t kill you. Come on, old friend!” Jeppe pulled Johannes out of the sauna and pushed him down the breakwater toward the swimming dock. He was already longing for the cold darkness below the surface. Jeppe hung the bathrobe over the railing and was on his way to the swim ladder when he heard his phone ringing. He walked back and plucked it from the pocket of his robe to see who was calling. The wind raised goose bumps on the bare skin of his arms. It was the police commissioner.

HER SHOES SANK into the soft sand, immortalizing each point of contact between her rubber soles and Greve Beach in a trail of footprints. Anette Werner let the dogs run on ahead and enjoyed the feel of her body working, lungs pumping oxygen in and out. The ocean lay like a bluish-gray belt, sending in whiffs of seaweed-scented air with the surf and mixing it with the sharp smell of beach gorse. The morning sun already stood well above the horizon. Anette breathed hard and pondered how the things that make us feel happy and alive generally also involve pain. Like becoming a parent, for example. Having little Gudrun a year and nine months ago was hands down the hardest—sometimes even the most boring—thing she had ever attempted. Even so, she loved her daughter so much that she began missing her the very second she waved goodbye every morning at the day care.

The dogs started barking up ahead. She could see them by the water’s edge and sprinted the hundred or so yards to her three eager border collies, running so fast she could taste blood in her mouth by the time she reached them. The dogs were growling and jostling one another, alternately jumping up or lying down flat in the sand. Anette separated them and crouched down to see what they had found.

A dead bird lay in the coarse sand. She recognized the sharp black-and-white markings, the green on its neck, and the delicate orange on its breast, a male common eider. It was lying on its back with the head turned to one side, like an infant. Its plumage was pretty much intact, it almost looked like it was sleeping. But between its yellow legs, where the abdomen should have been, there was just a bloody hole. The bird was dead. Maybe it had been migrating from Saltholm, headed north for the summer and left behind by the flock.