There was nothing alarming on Robin’s Facebook page, once Jack checked, but also nothing recent. He tried the Anne Frank House again. He was 276 in line, better, even hopeful, though soon enough he got the same message, that tickets were sold out and he should try again later. He waited in line for the Anne Frank House at the Monday market; at the Café de Prins, where they drank beer and ate bitterballen. He waited when they accidentally walked into the edge of the red-light district, and he didn’t even notice: they were going to see the Oude Kerk and passed by a bunch of women in their windows, a whole row curving around the back of the church. Not the ordinary second-story windows that Sadie had imagined, leaning as though in kissing booths, but plate-glass windows at ground level, so you could see all of them in their platonically ideal lingerie, bustiers, stockings, garters—human women, just like her. Once she had seen a pigeon at a zoo, looking at an emu. Jack was poking at his phone. He waited online at dinner at a café devoted to the memory of a 1930s singer who had clearly been very famous in the Netherlands: every wall covered in pictures of him, black-and-white, his mouth open, his eyes sorrowful at his words but filled with pleasure at the sound of his own voice; below on the checked tablecloth little wooden boats of mayonnaise sailed to the edge of the map. He waited online at breakfast, at the Rembrandt House—where you could just walk in, and which, like all of dry land, heaved around Sadie. She wanted to go back to the boat, to read, to drink wine, to peer out at Amsterdam.

The way Jack looked at his phone reminded her of the bad few years, a decade before, when he’d suddenly become obsessed with scratch tickets, a dedicated niche problematic gambler. What he liked was to hold the scratch ticket in one hand, a quarter in the other, and concentrate. Suspense, but not too much. Occasional reward, enough to keep you going, to reinvest. He spent thousands of dollars two bucks at a time. His money, his money entirely, she couldn’t say anything, but she did. “You have to stop!” “I know.” “This isn’t like you.” He might remember to throw away the spent tickets (though he had to check them again to make sure he really had, he had lost), but the material he scratched off—what was it called? what was it made of? was it safe to inhale? on the tickets it looked silver but rubbed off it was gray—it was everywhere, excretory, snotty.

Now he looked at his phone with the same arrogant hope, the same handsome panic, as though whatever happened would prove his worth, at least for the next twenty-four hours.