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Isla Lund was thirty-four years old, and she had lied on the rental application twice. Once about her income, which was fine because her income was real, and once about why she wanted to live on a houseboat, which was not fine, because the real reason was that her employer paid her to live there.

The boat was moored at the end of a canal in Noord, wedged between a blue steel barge and a wooden boat with a garden on its roof. She carried two bags up the gangway and set them down on the deck. The deck was small and clean. There was a folding table against the cabin wall, and on the table was a chessboard, fully set up, with one piece missing.

The white bishop. She leaned over it for a while, counting pieces, sure she was wrong, and she was not wrong.

"You're supposed to move the pawn first."

She turned around. A man stood on the deck of the next boat, holding two beers. He was thirty-eight or so, tall, with a beard he kept short and a shirt with paint on one sleeve.

"Excuse me?"

"The game. It's already in progress. Whoever rents this boat has to pick up where the last one left off." He came up the gangway without asking and put one beer on the table next to the board. "House rules. I'm Cody Slater. You're in my spot."

"Your spot?"

"The chair closest to the water. I'm a creature of habit." He sat down in the other chair and cracked his beer. "You're Isla, right? The rental agent mentioned a new tenant. Food stylist."

"That's right." She looked at the chair. It was just a chair. She sat in it anyway. "How do you know the rental agent?"

"I'm on the board of the association. President, actually. I sign off on every rental in this row." He drank. "Welcome to the neighborhood."

She felt that little cold drop in her stomach that she had learned to ignore. "So you're the one who set up the chessboard."

"Previous renter. Marcel. He moved out in March and left it mid-game. Nobody knows what happened to his bishop." Cody nodded at the board. "So. Black or white?"

"The white pieces are missing a bishop."

"Then don't play white."

She laughed before she could stop herself. He had a dry way of talking that made ordinary sentences feel like jokes with the punchline removed. She took a beer and opened it.

"I don't actually play," she said.

"Marcel said the same thing his first week. Then he played every night for eight months." He moved a black pawn two squares and sat back. "Your move whenever you're ready. No rush. I've waited since March."

She moved a pawn. They played badly on both sides for an hour, and he told her the practical things. Where the grocery store was. Which neighbors would knock on her hull at six in the morning. That the association met on the first Tuesday of every month on the communal barge, and attendance mattered if you wanted to be left alone.

"Left alone to do what?" she asked.

"Whatever you came here to do." He took her knight with his bishop and looked at her, easy, not smug about it. "Everyone who moves onto a boat in Amsterdam is running from something or toward something. Usually both."

Isla said she was running toward a quieter life, which was her second lie of the day, and he nodded like he believed it, which meant he did not.

---

The potluck was eleven days later, on a Saturday, on the communal barge in the middle of the row. She had been told to bring a dish, and Isla Lund did not bring dishes, she brought productions. She spent six hours on canapés. Tiny rye toasts with smoked eel and pickled shallot. Beet cured in gin, cut into cubes the size of dice, balanced on little spoons. A whipped goat cheese thing with dill oil that she had dripped onto the plates with a squeeze bottle, one drop at a time.

The neighbors loved it. There were maybe thirty people on the barge, all of them somewhere between thirty and seventy, and they crowded the table and asked her questions and she answered them with the practiced charm she used with magazine editors. A woman named Lesley took a photograph. An older man who restored engines for a living ate five of the eel toasts and told her she should open a restaurant.

Cody stood at the far end of the table with a plate of plain bread and cheese, the kind everyone else had brought.

"You didn't try mine," she said, when he came near.

"I did. Before everyone got here. I always taste first."

"And?"

He chewed a piece of bread slowly, buying himself time, and then put the plate down.

"They're perfect," he said. "That's the problem."

"Excuse me?"

"The eel thing. It's beautiful. Every cube is the same size. The drops of oil are the same size too, I noticed. There's like, ninety of them, and they're all identical." He picked up his bread again. "Nobody cooks like that for a potluck. A potluck is uneven. Some of it's too salty, some of it's great, you never know. This looks like a restaurant menu photographed by a marketing department."

"It's called presentation."

"It's called a portfolio." He said it without heat, almost kindly, and ate his bread. "You're interviewing us."

The cold drop came back, bigger this time. "I'm eating dinner with my neighbors."

"Sure." He shrugged and looked out at the canal, where the water was doing its flat evening gray thing. "Look, I'm not mad. I like the food. I'm just telling you what I saw. Ninety identical drops of oil."

"How do you even know it was ninety?"

"Because I counted. I was standing here waiting for the line to move and there was nothing else to do."

She wanted to argue, and she could not, because he was right, and because some part of her that she did not like very much felt caught, a child with her hand in the wrong drawer, and she pushed that thought away fast because it was stupid. She was thirty-four. This was her job.

"You're the board president," she said, changing the subject the way she changed subjects at dinner parties, smoothly. "So you get a vote on everything. That must be a lot of responsibility."

"It's seven votes, and they all agree with me, which makes it easy." He finished his bread and wiped his hands on a paper napkin, carefully, folding the napkin after. "You'll hear about the preservation thing eventually. The city wants to redevelop the east end of the row. We want it declared historic. There's a vote coming in the fall. That's the whole fight."

"I've heard the word preservation around," she said, which was true, she had heard it around her own kitchen table, in a conference room, on a spreadsheet.

"People feel strongly." He picked up his plate. "Anyway. Your chess game is getting worse, by the way. You lost your queen in my head about four moves ago."

"In your head?"

"I play it out at night. Sleep helps." He walked off toward the rail with his empty plate, and Lesley stopped him to ask something about the roof garden boat, and Isla stood there at the table with her perfect canapés, ninety identical drops of oil, and thought about the spreadsheet, and about the money she owed, and about how the man had counted.

She looked down the row toward her boat. Through the cabin window, if the light was right, you could see the chessboard on the deck, waiting, down one white bishop since March.

Cody came by on a Tuesday, standing on the gangway between their two boats with his hands in his pockets. "I finished it," he said. "The game. In my head, three times, and I keep getting a different result. So we should finish it for real."

"Now?"

"Why not. The light's good for another two hours."

She had a report due to her handler by Monday, a spreadsheet of neighbor attitudes with percentages, and she left it open on the table inside and came out and sat down across from him. The white bishop