At 3:07 a.m., she had woken cleanly and completely, Stefan shifting restlessly beside her. She was travelling back to Europe for the first time in eight years. She and Stefan had been to St. Kitts and San Francisco and London, but London was not (quite) Europe. They had spoken of going to Brazil together and to Dubrovnik, where Stefan’s father’s family had come from, now that things had settled down in the regions of the former Yugoslavia, but so far had done no more than speak of these trips. Amsterdam wasn’t Frankfurt. There was no reason to think that Rachel had gone from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, was there? There were times when Claire became obsessed with the minutiae of decisions that had led to her parents’ death. Which of them had booked the flight to Frankfurt, and why that flight and not another? It wasn’t that she wanted to blame either of them (there were other people, companies, who had legally been declared responsible for the accident), only to understand the sequence of events at every point along the way, as if knowledge of each moment would help to make sense of the calamitous whole.
