“Yes please.” She picked up her book and read it while Jack stared at his phone and made a coffee in the little humming coffee maker. The book had been recommended by a friend, and Sadie found it simultaneously fascinating and boring, a near and mere transcript of life. She wasn’t sure she hated the book, but she hated books like it, though she’d never read any of them—they were international, these books, Norwegian and English and Irish and Canadian, novels in which people bought coffee and had long conversations and felt sorry for themselves and reached no conclusions. How we live now, if by we you meant white people without much in the way of money problems. She, Sadie, was one of those. Perhaps if she had read it at home, she would have been riveted. Or perhaps she was riveted: she kept picking it up to read it, to see if anything had happened while she’d been away, she missed it in a way she didn’t miss other books.

“You want milk in this?” Jack asked.

“I got cream,” she said.

“I am sorry to report,” said Jack, “that you got buttermilk.”

“Oh. I should have known. Milk’s great, thank you.”

“Goddammit,” said Jack, looking at his phone.

In the Van Gogh Museum, Sadie leaned on the wall and declared, “This whole city is pitching.” It was a new shining building, crammed with people, near the Rijksmuseum. The boat did move, it turned out, a gentle rocking from side to side, barely noticeable on board, which got into your own personal canals and knocked you off balance later.

“I think we were lucky to get tickets,” said Jack.

“I might have to sit down. You don’t feel it?”

He tilted his head, to think, to recalibrate his inner ear. “No.”

They hadn’t realized that the paintings in the Van Gogh Museum were displayed in chronological order, and they accidentally started at the top, at the very end, not at Van Gogh’s death but at his brother Theo’s, who’d died months after Vincent’s suicide, in an asylum.

“I hadn’t known that,” said Sadie. “I thought he was the steady one.”

“Me too,” said Jack. He thought of Thomas—it seemed foolish to have come here, all things considered—and also of Thomas’s twin, Robin, who’d come to their wedding but had left before the meal. A nice man, Robin: ordinary, as Thomas had never been.