The landlady was a tall woman in her fifties, in a black crocheted cap shaped like a riding helmet. “Welcome!” she said as they crossed the street to the quay, pausing for a woman in a business suit on a bicycle, a dreadlocked white man on a bicycle, the handsomest old man Sadie had ever seen on a bicycle. “I am Cari. Your first time in Holland?”

“Yes,” said Sadie.

“Yes,” said Jack. “Well, I was here as a kid.”

“Goot!” said Cari. “The lock!” She brandished a key on a small block of wood, and with her other hand cupped the padlock on the boat’s hatch, fit them together, looked at first Jack and then Sadie to see if they understood this mystery: key, lock, access. They nodded.

She pulled up the hatch to reveal a small ladder down and announced, “You must always go backward,” while descending forward. “Two hands. Here we go.”

The inside of the boat was beautiful, painted in thick white blurring paint. The couches were white, the floor, the cabinets. The room was bigger than their living room at home, though low-ceilinged, with a line of square windows on both sides. The decorative pillows were pony patterned. Cari began to open cupboards—“You have a dishwasher, refrigerator. At night you put the padlock on the inside of the hatch, when you leave, on the outside. Garbage you deliver to the bridge—well, at any rate it is all here.” She patted a binder.

“It’s lovely,” said Jack.

“Yes, it is,” said Cari. She looked around the room. “It is very lovely.”

She shook their hands, and then went up the ladder and out the hatch. “Shall I close?” she called down. “You have the lock!”

“Yes, please,” said Jack.

The rules: Beer for breakfast. Don’t carry your passports on you. Unpack as soon as you can. Sadie sat down on the sofa.

“Don’t fall asleep!” Jack said.

“I won’t.”

The bed was beneath the wheelhouse, king-sized, on a shelf. Jack reckoned he would only just be able to sit up in bed, though Sadie would have no problem. Another rule: in any bed in any part of the world, they took their habitual sides, no matter how splendid or miserable. In this case, Sadie would face the water, and he the stone wall. That was all right. He took the little ladder to the right of the bed up to the old wheelhouse, now a sitting area with benches and a tiny bar and a framed picture of Anne Frank. Windows all around. To his right people walked along the quay and dodged cyclists; ahead, a huge church; to the left, the Anne Frank House, or the buildings all around the Anne Frank House, the front building that had always hidden it, the modern addition for admissions, with its gift shop and café.