Page 9 of What Happens in Amsterdam

I wait for more, surprised he’s bringing it up, becauseseventeen and an idiotdoesn’t make up for anything. We were certainly old enough to call it love.

“Then again,” he says, his eyes on his drink. “Clearly that relationship was not…what either of us thought it was.”

I choke on a Dutch cheese stick, certain I heard him wrong.

Not what either of us thought it was.

He was the one who hurtme, and he’s lamenting that the relationship didn’t measure up tohisexpectations?

“That’s just what happens when two idiots get together, I guess!” I say it as brightly as I can, even forcing a gritted smile, as though we’re competing for whose heart shattered into more pieces. There’s no world in which he has a claim to the title. Not when he’s the one who swung the hammer. “But hey, that was a long time ago. Good thing we grew up.”

I want so badly to press for more of an explanation, but I don’t know how to do it without proving him right: that I’m still the unsteady, uncertain girl he knew back then.

“Exactly. No need to dwell on the past.”

Okay, then. This was never going to be an excavation of our relationship when we haven’t spoken in so long. We’ll have a polite, superficial catch-up and then go our separate ways. I’ll limp back to my dungeon, and he’ll swagger home to a tall Dutch girlfriend who makes riding a bike look effortless.

Or wife.

Or children.

Jesus.He could really be anyone.

“So,” I say, tugging the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, still cold from the ice pack. “What about you? What do you…do?”

He dunks a bitterbal into mustard, and it doesn’t escape my notice that both of us are doing our best not to double-dip. “I’m a physiotherapist.”

I almost have to ask him to repeat it—that’s how much of a record scratch it is. If anything could interrupt my mental rewiring of Wouter van Leeuwen, it’s this. Every other memory I have of him is wrapped in his love of art. One of the reasons he’d sought out the exchange program was to bolster his university applications, and it was clear his parents didn’t think art was worth the time he spent on it. They wanted him in a steady career, something with a stable paycheck. They’d lived in Amsterdam for so long and rubbed elbows with the city’s most powerful families, the ones that could trace their histories back to medieval times. They wanted to be able to brag about their doctor or lawyer or engineer, not their starving artist.

I was doggedly optimistic about it, so enraptured by his talent. If anyone could make it in an unpredictable creative field, it would be him.

“You went to school for that? Physiotherapy?”

“Both my bachelor’s and master’s.” When I look impressed, headds, “It’s more common to have a master’s degree here. Very affordable.”

“Affordable higher education, wonder what that’s like.” Another forced smile. “Your parents must be proud. That was what they always wanted, right? Something important like that?”

I don’t intend for the words to be wrapped in barbed wire, but maybe that’s how they sound to him, because he suddenly tenses, his mouth forming a hard line.

“Right,” he says in a strange hollow tone. When he glances away, his lashes brush the lenses of his glasses. “They are.”

I still have a million questions:Why did you change your mind?andWhy did you give up art?andDid you ever miss me? Because I missed you, for much longer than I’d like to admit.

“You live nearby?” I ask instead. Keeping it surface. Safe.

“Just a few streets away, on the Prinsengracht.”

“I want to say I know where that is, but…”

He laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. It’s too polite, not one of his pure and genuine laughs, the kind that would shake his shoulders, make him hide his face because he didn’t know if he was supposed to find something funny. Me, dragging his chin up so I could look at him, especially the dimple that only popped when it was a true laugh.Let me see you, I’d say.

“The canals all have names here,” Wouter says. “Prinsengracht is one of the main ones—it means ‘Prince’s Canal.’ ”

“File that under basic facts I probably should have known by now.”

“It’s a hard adjustment,” he says. “I should know, given I did the same thing in reverse. How are your parents? And Phoebe?”

I think about what my parents said on the phone earlier this week.You can come home anytime.As though waiting for me to decide that Amsterdam is too much.

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