Page 32 of What Happens in Amsterdam

“I wanted to. It wasn’t what he wanted for me, I know that, butRoos was still in university, and my mom…I could tell it was harder for her. Not that it was easy for me, but I think, because of my work, I could compartmentalize sometimes. So I thought—no matter what, if these are the last years I get with him, even if he’s different from the father I grew up with…then I want to do it.”

I try to imagine this, Wouter at the bedside of the man in the photo right above me. Holding his hand as he grew frail.

“You should have had more time.”

In this moment, he’s clearer to me than he ever has been: a man who puts other people before himself. Who cares so deeply about his family, he’d do anything for them.

He nods again, mouth pressed in a firm line. If our thirty-year-old selves knew each other better, I wonder if he’d let himself show more emotion. “My mom’s in Culemborg now, a much smaller city. My grandmother moved there a while back because that’s where her husband was from. They debated selling the Amsterdam house, but I couldn’t handle the thought of losing it when we’d already lost so much. I wanted to keep all those memories intact. So I suggested we renovate, convert it from two units to three so we could rent out two of them, and I’d gladly take over the landlord responsibilities. I couldn’t live downstairs again, but—but I could live here.” As though aware he might be needed, George lifts himself from my lap and drops his head into Wouter’s, and Wouter absentmindedly strokes his fingers along his back. “This place comes with a lot of tradition. And with this marriage…it might seem counterintuitive, but I want them to think I’m happy.”

Are you?I want to ask, but we’re certainly not close enough for that.

“Of course, I know marriage isn’t a requirement for that,” he continues, hand buried in George’s soft brown fur. “But it feels worth the lie if it means they won’t worry about me. Because—I think they do sometimes.”

“The people who love us really can’t help it.” As different as our families are, I can understand that piece of it. “And they’ll be okay that you got married without telling them?”

“Maybe at first they won’t quite get it. But it’ll be easier because we knew each other as teens.”

“Then we’ll just have to sell it harder,” I say. “Whatever we need to do—I’m all in.”

“Thank you. Really. I think I might be getting more out of this than you are,” he quips, and while I’m relieved that telling me about his father hasn’t made him shut down, he is very firmly wrong about that. He straightens his posture, returning to the beginning of our conversation: the editing we have to do to our history. “We can start with what we talked about the other day. We fell in love as teenagers, and then reconnected.”

“Love at second sight,” I agree, the wordlovegetting trapped in my throat in a way it didn’t for him.

“You crashed your bike into me—we can keep that part.”

“Do we have to?” I rub at the spot on my knee where the bruises have finally started to fade.

A half smile. “Probably best to stick as close to the real story as possible. Let’s say that happened in the first couple days you were here, just to give us a bit of extra breathing room.”

“Okay. So I crashed my bike into you, and we realized how much we’d missed each other all these years. And we got married quickly because…”

“We couldn’t wait another minute. We’d been out of each other’s lives for over ten years, and we didn’t want to waste any more time.”

“You think they’ll buy that?”

At that, his gaze falls to the floor. “They…know how I feel about you.Feltabout you. Back in LA.”

I almost choke on my next sip of tea. “You told them? About us?”

I wasn’t prepared for any of tonight’s revelations, and this one stuns me more than it probably should. I assumed that after the breakup text, he hid me away like I was something to be ashamed of. By the time I got to college, I sometimes questioned whether any of it had been real, and the hookups I had freshman year, the greedy touches and desperate releases—none of them made that ache go away. All through my twenties, every casual relationship felt like something was missing. The guy who only texted me after midnight. The guy who hated foreplay. Jace. Maybe it was just the innocence of first love and the dry-throat, beating-heart adrenaline rush of discovery.

Or maybe I was broken.

They know how I feel about you.

I thought I did, too.

He nods, toeing a line in the rug with his sock. “Not everything, but some of it.” A sip of his tea, another long pause. “What happened when I went back to Amsterdam, I want you to know—it’s one of my biggest regrets.”

When his gaze meets mine, it’s almost wistful.

I try for a joke because anything else might take this conversation somewhere I’m not prepared for it to go. “So, what, they think I’m this charming, jaw-droppingly gorgeous American who was the love of your life?”

A quirk of a smile. “Precisely. Not that you aren’t all those things, but—”

Now the joke is getting out of hand. “It’s okay,” I say quickly, still reeling but trying to spare us both. “You don’t have to pump my ego.”

“I’m not.” His brow furrows, as though he’s working out some complex equation. “Danika. It can’t be some mystery to you that you’re beautiful.”

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