She turned the watch over in her palm. Perhaps Leo could get interested in horology. She pictured him hunched over a watchmaker’s bench and thought about tossing the note and keeping the watch. Instead, she transferred it from her father’s nightstand into her own. Bring, he’d written. Not mail, not get. The sticker was as close to a will as he’d left, goddamn him. She should probably—she thought, aware of the daft expression already on her face—attempt to honor it.

It took a year to settle the estate, sell the condo, come into the little bit of money that would allow them for the first time to travel abroad. Joanna bought Leo the bunk beds that she had wanted as a child. When she went to wake him up for school in the morning, she never knew at what altitude she would find him. That morning he’d hidden himself in the top bunk among the stuffed animals and the alligator-patterned comforter cover, which had disgorged its comforter. Then she saw one bare heel. Even his heel was fast asleep and dear.

“Leo,” she said.

The heel disappeared. He balled himself up under the covers as though winding himself awake. Then he sat up and blinked, bare-chested and skinny.

“What do you think about Vikings?” she asked him.

“They’re not my favorite,” he said, and put out his hand. “Glasses?”

He was newly bespectacled, having failed a vision test at school. Because he hadn’t cared she’d picked him out a pair of square black glasses, so that he looked not like the bookish skinny wan pubescent boy he was, but a skinny wan 1980s rocker. Wow, he’d said, stepping out of the optician’s, scanning the parking lot, the parking lot trees, the Starbucks and the Staples. Wow. Just like that, both he and the world looked different.

She found his glasses on a bookshelf and handed them up. “Vikings aren’t your favorite?”

He scooted to the end of the bunk and climbed down the ladder. “I like Romans.” The underpants he’d slept in were patterned with lobsters, too small. “Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets. Did you know that?”

“I did not,” she said.

For a year and a half, before Leo could read but after he’d begun to talk, Joanna had known everything in his head, thoughts and terrors, facts and passions. He’d belonged to Fairyland then; afterward, to books and facts. Now he had thoughts all the time that she hadn’t put in his head, which she knew was the point of having children but destroyed her.

“So,” she said. “I have a friend in Denmark. I was thinking we might go there this summer.”