Sadie had somehow not bothered to imagine Amsterdam at all, beyond bicycles and picturesque houses, though she had an image in her head of the red-light district left over from high school: a friend had gone to Amsterdam and said she’d passed the prostitutes in their windows, which Sadie had imagined as ordinary residential windows, with sashes; she could see women in their lingerie leaning, resting their breasts on the sills.

They walked along the canal, past little design stores and souvenir shops and bars. The sunset was peachy, blue, a parfait, perfect. Every bar was their ideal bar. They passed a lit-up grocery store and went in to get supplies and walked out, swinging the white plastic bags on their wrists. They crossed again in front of the Anne Frank House.

“We’ll crack you!” said Jack, and then, “Jesus, listen to the man.” He stopped. “Do you feel different?”

“Different how?”

“Different married.”

“Oh, that. No,” she said.

“I do.”

“That’s because your parents are alive.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“Poor Thomas,” said Sadie suddenly. “Poor Robin.” Robin was Thomas’s twin brother.

“Poor all of us,” said Jack.

There was a liquor store around the corner, selling mulled wine dispensed from the sort of stainless-steel suburban samovar that Sadie remembered from elementary school functions. “This is very good,” the liquor-store proprietor promised them, working the spigot. He was in his forties, with a saddlebag goatee, wider at the bottom. “This will make you love each other truly.”

“What if we already love each other truly?” asked Jack.

“Why, I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “You’d be the first instance in my shop.”

The walls were lined with bottles. Jack pulled a Dutch liqueur from a shelf. “My father would appreciate this place,” he said, and just then an American man walked in, looked around, and said, “Do you sell bread?”

“Do I sell bread?” the shopkeeper said. “Do I sell bread? Look around you, man! What sort of place do you believe you have found yourself in? No, no, don’t go away, you’re in luck. We have here on exhibition a mythical creature: the man and wife in truly love with each other. Look!” said the shopkeeper. “Marvel!”

“I love my wife,” said the bread-seeking American.

“No,” said the liquor-store owner, “you don’t.”