“Does it move?” He’d always had a way of repeating her questions back, sometimes with love and sometimes with contempt and sometimes with wonder at the question itself. That was the case now. “No, I don’t—it must be moored.”

“Prepare to turn right,” said the phone. Then, “Turn right.”

Canal after canal, bakery after souvenir shop. You couldn’t deny it: Holland was Dutch. “Looks good,” said Jack, examining a menu outside a café, “we should come back,” but Sadie was looking at the canal in front of them.

“I like a canal,” she said.

“You hated Venice.”

“Yes. True. Let Venice sink! Are we almost there?”

“Nearly. Prinsengracht. That’s our address.”

Houseboats all along the canal. Jack had asked his Dutch brother-in-law, Piet, for advice on where to stay, but Piet was from Rotterdam, had gone back there after his wife’s death, insisted that Amsterdam was a Mickey Mouse city. “Come to Rotterdam,” Piet said, and they would, after Amsterdam.

There it was: a white houseboat. It looked good, but you never really knew till you got in. Jack texted the landlady, and they went to a nearby bar to wait for her. When you fly overnight to Europe you’re allowed to have beer for breakfast. That was one of their inviolable rules.

Beer for breakfast was what they had instead of children; trips to Europe every three years, indulgence. In nearly twenty years they had lived through the varieties of international practicalities: traveler’s checks, phone cards, internet cafés—how devoted they’d been to internet cafés!—paying for wireless in coffee shops, cheap burner phones they needed to top up in shady convenience stores, and now: nothing. Their cell phone company offered unlimited data. They had filled their wallets with euros from an ATM at the airport and had credit cards with no international transaction fee. They would never be lost. They still could be cheated.

Occasionally Sadie thought about the life they might have had with children. No better, probably. She was nearly forty. A child was unlikely but, yes, you elderly Valerts, technically possible, though none of your business. Jack was forty-six, his possibilities undimmed, except for the ones that involved fame and fortune. They’d chosen Amsterdam so that they could see Piet afterward, and because it was a city they had no memories of. They lived in America and wished they lived elsewhere. They’d always thought they might someday. Now elsewhere, geopolitically speaking, was narrowing to England, which was, according to Jack, as bad as where they were. Surely not, said Sadie. “I wish it weren’t,” said Jack.

Another reason to be legally married: the despots of the world still cared about things like that. They might need proof that they belonged together.