So many shop windows in Amsterdam were pleasing at a distance but dizzying close-up, whole windows of Delft: tiles, mugs, clogs, towering tulip vases, figurines. There was no better blue, but even it couldn’t make everything classy.

“I like the rabbit,” said Jack.

“Who, Miffy?”

“The rabbit.”

“The rabbit with the Xed-out mouth,” she said.

“Those’re whiskers, surely.”

“Miffy,” she said. “The bunny rabbit’s name.”

“You don’t like it.”

“It’s twee,” she said.

“It’s not!”

“Bit twee.”

“You’re an American. You don’t even know what twee is.”

“You’re an American,” she said. Then, “Okay, what does it mean?”

“It’s—it’s like wet,” he said. “To describe somebody who’s dim. Americans don’t know what wet means because you’re all wet.”

“You’re all wet,” she said. “You’re all twee. Prezzies,” she said. “Sammies. Mozzies. The English are twee,” she said suddenly and with passion. She had never believed in anything so deeply. She had hated tweeness her entire life, the cutesy, the sweet, the things that could not wound you. She’d rather be an idiot than twee. “You have to be from a small country to be twee. I’m from a large one. You like puppets,” she said accusingly.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. It’s all right.” He put his arm around her, and they started walking. “I don’t want to go back to America.”

“Me neither. I have to work Monday.”

“God,” said Jack, whose semester did not start for weeks. “I wish I knew what to do. Where to live.”

“Live where you live,” she said. “With your wife.”

“Yes with you,” he said. He got his phone out again. He thought about calling his sister Katie, the twins’ mother, but he couldn’t figure out what to say: she did not need his premonitions. He pulled up the Anne Frank House website—they were passing in front of it, and maybe there would be a last-minute, end-of-the-day ticket.

“Can we sit a minute?” he said.

“It might not happen,” said Sadie.

“You have to believe it’ll happen.”

“It’s okay if it doesn’t.”

“It’s not!” he said. He looked at the grand modern entrance they’d built onto the nineteenth-century Dutch one. A glass front with heavy doors, the new and pristine lobby visible. Anything Anne Frank had touched was hidden.

There was nobody waiting in line to get in with their timed tickets, just a young bespectacled guard with a walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder. A father approached with his daughter. The daughter was ten, perhaps, or eleven, and seemed to have dressed herself in a way that in a few years would seem louche on her but now looked like a costume: mismatched socks, Mary Janes, black pants, a piebald cardigan falling off one shoulder, a beret. She looked bookish and doomed; she was just coming into glamour. The guard shrugged and smiled.