Page 93 of What Happens in Amsterdam

Maybe the truth is that I never have been.

He presses his mouth together in what might be surrender. The way his fingertips start fidgeting yanks me back in time. This is the guarded Wouter from when we first reunited, the man I barely recognized.

Then he reaches into his pocket to pass me the sunglasses I left at his mother’s house. “Let me know when you figure it out,” he says. “I’ll be here.”

The words are curt, but they’re not cruel. There’s only heartbreak on his face, that thing I thought I had full ownership of when it came to us.

This time, though—this time I’m the one who put it there, and it aches all the way down to my toes.

Fight, I urge myself.Fuckingfight. Because I can still say it. Ican keep him from leaving. JustIandloveandyouin exactly that order, and he’ll be mine again.

“I—I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted,” I stutter out instead, mouth tripping over the words.

He looks at me for a long moment. “No,” he says before he turns around. “You were more.”

Twenty-five

The first time Wouter andI broke up, it felt like a betrayal.

That text arrived the week after summer vacation started, a sun-drenched day like so many other sun-drenched days. I’d meticulously planned out the whole week, determined to keep myself occupied with Wouter gone: beach, bowling, movies, parties. I was going to be a social fucking butterfly.

Instead I read the message over toast and eggs, dropped my phone into the butter dish, and got into the car in my pajamas. I drove straight to Phoebe’s USC dorm, where she was staying for summer term, every minute I was stuck in traffic feeling like a personal attack.

“Thatasshole,” she said after she wiped butter off my phone, rubbing my back, letting me cry. “You deserve so much better.” At seventeen, a miserable mess of self-esteem and forehead acne, I wasn’t sure if I did.

She said all the right things, those things you’re supposed to sayduring a breakup that the person who’s been broken up with might pretend they understand but never actually believe.

This time she doesn’t say any of them, but she still holds me while I cry on the train.

I think we both need some space to process everything, Wouter texted when I got back to Amsterdam.I’ll stay in Culemborg this week. Take as long as you need.

I wondered if it was implied that the space he’s giving me is to move out. If that’s the case, I’m not sure why I haven’t been able to start packing.

This isn’t a breakup, not exactly, and only in part because we made such a mess of the marriage, never putting a label on our relationship. And yet I let him know me in a way I haven’t done since…well, sincehim.

The apartment is too quiet without Wouter and George, and I can’t understand how he lived here on his own for so many years. We’ve marked every square inch—centimeter—of it, all the places where we laughed and drank tea and shared our deepest secrets. The places where we touched and moaned and murmured each other’s names.

I convince myself that if I go to bed early, the memories won’t be able to find me. But they keep me awake half the night anyway, because my brain is cruel and there was never a timeline in which Wouter would make anything less than the deepest imprint.

It isn’t that I don’t know what he wants from me.

It’s that I’ve never been able to successfully give it—to anyone.

There’s nothing I want to do less than see my parents the next morning. I texted Phoebe, begging her to help me with an excuse.Rip off the band-aid, babe, she wrote back.The anticipation is much worse than whatever you’re picturing. I promise.

I meet them in their hotel lobby, praying she’s right.

Despite the shock of yesterday, they look much more well-rested. My mother’s in a patterned shirtdress and isn’t gripping her RFID-blocking purse nearly as tightly. My father, still in his Dodgers cap—which I should probably tell him is a dead giveaway for a tourist—gives me a tentative smile as he adjusts the strap of his camera bag. Because of course he brought a real camera, certain his phone wouldn’t be able to do Amsterdam justice.

They flew all this way, I remind myself as we awkwardly hug hello.

“How’s the jet lag?” I ask.

“We’ve been up since four,” my father admits, fighting a yawn. “Do you know what they have on the TV at four in the morning? Phone sex commercials!”

I’m fully prepared to defend the city by saying this surely can’t be just an Amsterdam thing, but the two of them just laugh, like it’s another quirk on a long list of them.

We head for breakfast at a nearby café with terrace seating, tables propped up along a canal. There’s no better way to dine in Amsterdam, and if we’re going to have this conversation, we might as well have it somewhere beautiful.

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