“You don’t want a baby,” she said. “Your parents want a baby. You’re too old to care so much about what they want.”

He dropped her hand and strode ahead to the boat. All week he’d slowed his pace to hers, she realized now. When she caught up, he was unlocking the hatch, but furiously—she worried he’d drop the key in the canal. “That is not fair,” he said, “that’s not fair, that’s not fair.” There had to be a better phrase. “That is so not fair.” He pulled the hatch up. “Go ahead,” he told her, and she went down the little ladder the forbidden way, facing forward, so that she didn’t have to look up at him. She grabbed her book and took herself straight to the bedroom, slid herself onto the bed like a book herself, turned on the lamp with its elf-cap shade, and began to read in her usual state of irritation, my God, nothing would ever happen in this book, maybe she should chuck it into the canal, and she was at first only dimly aware of the sound of the hatch lowering, and the padlock clucking shut, but a different sound from usual, because it was clucking from the outside.

Jack had locked her in.

Well, he thought, once he’d closed the hasp and slid it home, that, maybe, maybe that is anti-Semitic. His phone rang. He assumed it was Sadie, realizing what he’d done: he’d locked his wife in a boat to punish her for being insufficiently interested in Anne Frank. For being insufficiently interested in his feelings. It was a malady of marriage. His malady, he understood. Maybe he could give the boat a kick and send it down the canal, off to the low countries, whatever those were. The phone was ringing. He answered it.

“It’s Katie,” said his youngest older sister. She was crying.

He hoped it was one of his parents, knew it was not.