This was a lifelong habit. It didn’t feel suicidal but the opposite, a satisfying of a not-quite-urge. Whenever she moved to a new place, for instance, she looked for the support she’d hang herself from. In her current house, a barn conversion, there were beams everywhere, though the best was in the kitchen, with an iron hook. Finding the spot calmed her. She didn’t want to kill herself, but she did want to think about it. After all, she wasn’t afraid of death.

She decided to live forever or as long as possible. She would learn to be a better person, for her niece’s sake. (Why niece? She couldn’t imagine Jonas as the father of a son, was all.) Today it felt entirely possible. Was this optimism? Was this what Micah and Jonas felt?

The water behind a boat is the deepest wishing well in the world: It has drag and intention. Throw your dreams into it. If they don’t pull you in and drown you, perhaps they’ll come true.

On a table inside she found a flyer. CHILDREN’S ENTERTAIMENT, it said, 2:30 IN THE KID ZONE! MAGIC, BALLOONS! Well, she thought. Why not. The boat appeared so empty she imagined nobody else might show up, the sea sufficiently turbulent that any children were lying flat and sipping warm water. Professional courtesy, one children’s performer to another. She would be his audience.

But the KID ZONE!, a glassed-in space just beyond the cafeteria, was full. With palpable delight, a young white woman (English, Mistress Mickle was pretty sure) watched her two-year-old daughter waddle up to the man in the Chinese hat: how lucky, the mother clearly thought, that the world had the chance to experience her child! A plump redheaded boy clutched a model of the very boat they were on, purchased from the gift shop. Two-thirds of the audience seemed to be one large Muslim family, or several families traveling together: kids in the front row, a couple of men leaning against the far wall, four young women in matching robin’s-egg-blue head scarves who could have been mothers to the audience, or older sisters. Not all the teenage girls wore head coverings, so probably they weren’t all related. They were different strains. Denominations. The God of one allowed you to show your neck, and the God of another allowed you to wear slacks.

Where were they from? Somewhere in the Middle East. Even if she heard them speak, she wouldn’t know. She had a bum ear: probably why the height of her acting career was a villain on a children’s game show. Dutch sounded like German to her, and Portuguese like Russian. Were they Iraqi, Yemeni? Then one of the teenage boys sighed and said to a teenage girl, in a voice of dread and Birmingham, “This is taking forever. I wish we’d flown.”

“Fly, then,” said his sister. “Go ahead.”