Page 7 of What Happens in Amsterdam

As I’m leaving the office, Phoebe messages me with a few choice words and emojis for my landlord, asks if I’m free to talk during her lunch break. Ten p.m. in Amsterdam, and while that typically wouldn’t be my Friday night bedtime, this move might as well have aged me forty years.

It’s dark and damp, the resignation a heavy weight in my chest as I head out to my bike, where some asshole dumped a few empty beer bottles in the basket. Nope, I discover as I pick one up and liquid splashes across my sleeve—not empty.

Now Amsterdam’s architecture seems to mock me. The buildings are all the same height, and there’s nothing on the horizon. I’d gotten so used to the sight of the San Gabriel Mountains that I’m only just now realizing how much I took them for granted. Here the landscape feels sullen. Desolate. My fingers are frozen on the handlebars, cold biting at my face. If I were in LA, I’d be sitting in traffic right now, maybe on my way to dinner with Phoebe, or maybe I’d be back on the apps and waiting at a cocktail bar to meet a disappointing date. Even that sounds more appealing than biking home to a flooded apartment. I might be able to afford a night or two in a hotel—I just wish I could explain why that feels like giving up.

All I want right now is a sense of peace. Warmth and comfort and a garbage disposal, the things I left back in California because apparently the only solution to my problems was moving across the globe.

And it must be because I’m so deep in self-pity that I don’t notice the light has turned red.

Because this time, I smash right into an oncoming biker, sending both of us toppling to the ground.

Something hard juts into my hip and I scrape my knee on the way down, rain-slick clothes on damp pavement. The other guy shouts in rapid-fire Dutch that I don’t need to understand to know he’s pissed, but I do catch a word that sounds liketourist.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” I say, squinting through wet hair the crash plastered to my face, trying to ignore the searing pain in my hip.

More Dutch, some swearing in English, and then: “Danika?”

Three

Wouter van Leeuwen, my firstlove and first everything, is staring back at me, our bikes twisted in a heap between us. Broad shoulders fill out his raincoat, his gray Blundstones scuffed with age. He is almost the boy I remember—a swish of blond hair, darker at the roots, with far more stubble along his jaw than he had at seventeen. Deep hazel eyes, the kind he could render so beautifully in a self-portrait while I struggled to get their color just right. Round metal-rimmed glasses dotted with rain, slightly askew. The faintest freckles along his nose.

This can’t be real life, and yet it’s the only thing in the past two weeks that’s made any amount of sense. Tiny Dutch pancakes and dogs in bicycle baskets? Completely fake.

Wouter van Leeuwen, with his soft mouth and baffled gaze, the boy—man—I’ve never been able to forgive?

So painfully, perfectlyreal.

He blinks himself out of the daze before I do, extending one large hand to pull me to my feet, then hauls both our bikes to the sidewalk with all the swiftness of a ball boy at Wimbledon.

“What are you doing here?” he asks once we’re no longer blocking traffic. Now his voice slips into the coziest memory centers of my brain. I should have recognized it immediately—even with thirteen years between then and now, I never thought I’d forget the sound of the first voice to utterI love you.

In English, and then in Dutch.

I hug my jacket tighter, but I can’t decide if I’m too warm or too cold. “Trying to run you off the road, apparently.” The joke doesn’t have the right amount of humor to it. I’m too in shock, and my whole right leg is screaming with pain. “I’m—holy shit. Sorry. Trying to wrap my mind around this.”

Wouter van Leeuwen still lives in Amsterdam. Wouter van Leeuwen ishere, right in front of me, after the promises we made and his heartless breakup and before that, the relationship we couldn’t tell anyone about.

Despite all the chaos I’ve caused in the span of five minutes, he breaks into a grin. Like he’shappyto see me, when the feeling coursing through my body is more along the lines of panic and dread, with a sprinkling of unresolved conflict on top. “You look…” He trails off, as though realizing exactly how I look—like I was just fished out of a canal—and then blushes when his blatant assessment of me lasts a beat too long. “Wow,” he finishes, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. “How long are you visiting?”

“I live here,” I say. “I got a job at a startup. Just finished my first week.”

Now the grin slides into an expression of pure disbelief. “You’re serious? You live here, in Amsterdam? Holy shit is right. There’s a café I like on this next street. Let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me all about it?”

He locks his bike to a rack and does the same with mine, and then I am following Wouter van Leeuwen down the block, limpingon my injured leg while he shakes his head and mutters, “Danika Dorfman. I can’t believe it.”

The café is styled like a living room, with plush mismatched furniture, a bookshelf-lined wall, and mellow eighties rock playing in the background. Wouter asks the server for something in Dutch as we grab an empty table in the corner, and she returns with an ice pack, two waters, and a few bandages.

“I’m okay, really,” I say, fully aware that I’m bleeding from at least three places, but Wouter just lifts his eyebrows at my shredded work slacks. I relent, holding the ice pack to my knee while I push damp hair out of my face with my other hand. I have a medium amount of vanity now that my birthmark and I aren’t constantly at war, but every time I imagined seeing Wouter again, I looked much hotter than I do now. And I had definitely showered.

I’ve tested so many comebacks on him in my head, mentally cursed him out like I was casting a spell. A decade may have passed, but every relationship I’ve had, every time I’ve second-guessed myself—it all comes back to the year we spent wholly obsessed with each other.

And yet the words that leave my lips are “Are you hurt?” Because even if I’m bitter, that crash was absolutely my fault.

“A couple scrapes.” He rubs his glasses lenses along his shirt to dry them. “I’ve had worse.”

God, I’m still processing the absurdity of him sitting across from me, trying to reconcile this man with the boy I used to know. His details are slow to come into focus, a pencil drawing coming to life. Once I’ve started breathing again and sipped some water, I can properly take him in.

He was cute at seventeen, with a single dimple and glasses he was always forgetting to wear so he went without them sometimes, squinting down at his sketchbook.You’re going to get a wrinkle rightthere, I’d say, pressing my thumb between his brows, and he’d grab my thumb and bring it to his lips. Now there’s no denying it—he isbeautiful, especially once he takes off his jacket, revealing a green button-up that brings out that color in his eyes. The rough hair along his jaw and chin is flecked with gray and, combined with the faintest lines at the edges of his eyes, makes him look mature, settled in his skin. I once dotted those light freckles with paint, turning his face into a work of art even though it already was. And his hands—I fell so hard for his hands.

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