No children waited for Mistress Mickle on the other side of her journey, nor husband, nor (at the moment) paramour, and that was fine. She liked sex and she liked privacy, and she’d reached her mid-thirties before realizing life could offer her both. The time that living with another person took up! The small talk! The politeness! Life alone was banal, too, but at least the banality wasn’t narrated.

It was bad for you to say aloud the minor grievances of the day, the rude bank teller and the gum on the bottom of your shoe. It was terrible to alter your diet to what another person liked or didn’t: The last man she’d lived with had hated capers. And so she’d given up capers, until she gave up the man. His name was Philip. He was a theater director who had made fun of her accent, the way she dropped ts in the middle of English expressions and words: Bee’root. Wai’rose. Whi’bait. Qui’right.

All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis.

This was a day crossing, but she’d taken an outside cabin, one with a double bed and a single bed and a surprisingly large bathroom with a toilet, shower, sink, and three thick, white towels, more than Jonas had to his name. (What had happened to him, that he lived like that? Shit happens, Jonas would say. Life happens, Micah would say, while you’re making other plans.) A free minibar. She ate both chocolates and the bag of potato chips while the boat was still in port. The strange elation of the previous evening was still in her: she felt calmer than she had in ages. The Irishwoman was pregnant. Their family would continue after all! Aunty Mickle! Still stoned, she thought, though she wasn’t sure that was true, and she lay down on the single bed, because it was on the right side of the cabin, and the homing device in Mistress Mickle’s brain always went right: on busses, on trains, in restaurants. There was a little wall-mounted television; she tuned it to the closed-circuit cameras in the belowdecks kennels. Empty. Empty. Empty. The channel suited her.