Also appealing was the prospect of traveling a lot, which I had never before done, so now we did, another permanent item on an unfamiliar to-do list. We rented an apartment in Rome near the Campo de’ Fiori, another in the Barrio Gotico of Barcelona. We flew to London for a long weekend, to Ireland for a long night of dinner with friends in a castle. We went to Paris on a regular basis, taking the two-hour high-speed train into the Gare de l’Est or driving with the dog and maybe some visiting relative, hurtling through Lorraine and Champagne in our German station wagon, purchased secondhand after a month of car shopping, a time frame that corresponded exactly to how long it took us to figure out that break was the French term for station wagon.

We popped over to Bruges and Delft, Nancy and Amsterdam. We drove all the way down France to the Alps of the Haute-Savoie; all the way across Germany to Bavaria; all the way up to Copenhagen (Ten hours! Awful traffic in Germany), and a hugely satisfying side-trip pilgrimage to the motherland, a.k.a. Legoland Billund.

We saw cathedral-dominated downtowns and soulless suburban sprawl. We strolled interchangeable high streets (Zara is everywhere) and unique cityscapes (Bamberg is spectacular). We drove 100 miles per hour on the autobahn, and we crawled carefully through the frost-covered back roads of the Ardennes.

Every other weekend, we were someplace else.

Little by little, I learned how to do everything I needed to do. I made some friends. I spoke enough French to get by, and enough Luxembourgish to not be rude. I decided that if I refused to buy my children new pajamas, they’d be fine sleeping in underwear and T-shirts, and I’d have a crucial 10 percent less laundry to do. And when my kids went to school, I started really missing them, instead of sighing in relief for six straight hours.

I had achieved a level of stasis that looked a lot like a normal life. So at the beginning of our second year abroad, I took my laptop to a cafe, typed “The Expats” at the top of a new file and started writing a novel. In which the protagonist moves to Luxembourg to follow a spouse’s career and is thrust into the identity of a newly minted stay-at-home parent to two small children, cooking and cleaning, folding laundry and speeding around Europe in a secondhand German station wagon.

I was trying to lightly fictionalize my life. But I realized I needed to invent a bigger shift, because, even fictionalized, my life overseas had become too routine to be exciting. So I added a huge twist: The protagonist hadn’t quit a normal job to move to Europe, she had quit being a spy, and her husband had never known. Luxembourg was exactly the type of place where this thing would go on: private-banking center, tax shelter, pan-European locale where half the residents were from somewhere else. This is where someone could come to reinvent herself. This is where I had come to reinvent myself.

Then, one day four years ago, my wife got another difficult-to-refuse job offer, back in New York. Our adventure came to a sudden end.