They woke up—an hour later? Three?—to daylight out the window by Sadie’s head. Porthole, thought Sadie. But square: Did portholes have to be round? Her feet were hot. She was wearing her slippers but nothing else. She felt—glad. She wasn’t sure gladness was an emotion she was familiar with. Happiness and joy, yes, durable, recognizable; gladness was thinner than that, historical, but useful. A shim to even out a wobbly sad table. She was glad they were in Amsterdam. She was glad that they had married.

“That’s the Anne Frank Hoos,” said Jack, pointing across her body.

“Hoos?”

“Hu-ees. I don’t speak Dutch.”

“You certainly don’t.”

“We should go out in the world,” he said, and kissed her shoulder.

He wore a green shirt that she had ordered for him off the internet, intended for a Norwegian cheesemonger, and a pair of corduroys of a color he’d favored since he was three, brownish red. She had bought her flowered Swedish dress in New York City.

“Quite picturesque for a bridge where you leave garbage,” he said as they stopped at its peak. They looked down at the moored barges on the margins of the canal and the tourist barges gliding down the middle.

“Where are the pot dealers?” said Sadie. “Where are the sex workers?”

“In the red-light district.”

“Poor kid,” she said, a cheek on his bicep; he was so much taller than she was, “were you scarred for life?”

“You tell me, Doctor,” he said.

“What time does the Anne Frank House close?” she asked. “Maybe we could go there now.”

“Not sure. Let’s see.”

But it turned out that the Anne Frank House sold tickets only online—it said so on the doors around the side—and when Jack checked on his phone he discovered it was booked up for two weeks. “Dammit. But it says they release some tickets every day. We’ll try tomorrow. I guess we should have done some research.”

“Never,” she said, because they never did, not ahead of time. Never consulted a guidebook, combed through a website (except for accommodation). They were exactly the same in this respect, one of the pleasures of their life together, their love of happenstance. How, when traveling, they congratulated themselves on their luck!

They got a free tourist map from a nearby souvenir shop and examined the spiderweb of Central Amsterdam.

“We avoid this,” said Jack, pointing to the center.

“But what if we want to go to a sex show?” she said.

“Ha ha.”

But what if? she thought.