She always forgot how some aspects of England were so English, so very Masterpiece Theatre: in order to get married in the village church, Sadie had to live with the elder Valerts for three weeks so that she might be registered as a spinster of the parish. Then the banns would be read, whatever that meant. Jack, on the other hand, could be where he pleased. What pleased him—“I have to,” he said apologetically—was to go to Coventry, to an academic conference on puppetry in medieval mystery plays. So for the first week of Sadie’s parish spinsterhood, she slept alone on one of the twin beds of the Valerts’ guest room and was woken every day at three thirty a.m., which was, perversely, when dawn broke in Sussex in July. It wasn’t the light that woke her, but the birds who saw the light and began laughing. Screeching. Saying in avian syllables designed to lacerate the eardrum, Well, you wanted to get married!

By the time Jack got back, his father was not speaking to Sadie for obscure reasons. Or not obscure: she didn’t plan to change her name, or to wear a white dress, or to promise (as the outdated copy of the Book of Common Prayer he gave her suggested) to be “sober, quiet, and obedient.”

“I might manage two of those at a time,” she said. “But never all simultaneously.” He didn’t think that was funny. She hadn’t known what a wedding meant in England: hats and child attendants and a dinner party to celebrate her engagement in which the women had to actually leave the dining room before the port was passed. No doubt they had all voted for Brexit. “You don’t have to obey,” said Michael Valert, “but I hope you’ll consider children. I hope you’re not so liberated as all that.” Then, with a depth of feeling that startled her, he said, “I think we could all use something to look forward to.”

They were joined in the church by a young rector with the booming voice of an old prophet, or actor, or train conductor, or possibly rector—Sadie had no experience with rectors. She knelt before him and thought of how much her little Yiddishe mama would have hated to see her do it. Then she stood up and they were married.

A month later they were in Holland, in Amsterdam: Jack and Sadie, honeymooners, newlyweds, middle-aged. Jack’s phone said aloud, in its sexy English accent, “Prepare to turn right.”

“But are you?” Sadie asked. “Prepared.”

“Never.”

“I didn’t think so.” She hooked her arm in his. With his other arm he pulled along their thunking suitcase.

They were staying in a houseboat across from the Anne Frank House.

“Does it move?” she asked.