Page 56 of The Expat Affair

I hustle down the hallway and follow her inside.

Her apartment is furnished exactly like I would have expected, with faded floors and outdated fixtures and furniture of heavy, carved oak topped with what look like mini Persian rugs, the fringe hanging down the side. Her curtains are drawn, but I can hear the reporters just outside, their voices muffled by the glass.

“Hufters,” she says, flapping a dismissive hand in their direction, and from her expression, I’m assuming it’s something bad.

She leads me down a narrow hallway and into a galley kitchen where time has stood still. Formica table, square white wall tiles, metal countertops, an ancient water heater hanging from the wall above the sink, a relic from the time of World War II.

And at the very back of the house, a door.

I step to it and push the curtains aside, peering out the window onto a courtyard the size of a postage stamp. My gaze trails over the moss-covered tiles topped with a plastic table with two matchingchairs, over a collection of potted plants and colorful garden gnomes in various poses, to a wooden gate set in the back hedge.

The alley.I had no idea, and how could I? The window in my place is set too high on the slanted wall to see anything but sky. I’d need a ladder to even open it.

“Thank you,” I say, whirling around. “Dank uwel.You are a lifesaver. Truly. You don’t have any idea how amazing this is.”

The neighbor beams and shoos me outside with another surge of Dutch, and with one last wave, I take off across the backyard. Slowly, I peel the door open and peek into the alley. Except for a bike parked a few houses down, it’s blissfully empty.

I step into it and disappear into the night.

Willow

It’s weird how I can’t stop thinking about Rayna.

She’s the first thing I thought of when I tugged a warm and sweaty Sem out of bed and into a pair of jeans and his favorite Ajax sweatshirt, wriggling socks onto his feet so the seam lay straight across the tops of his chubby toes. I thought about her as I was spreading peanut butter on his bread or apple slice, bribing him with the promise of a gummy bear for each gooey bite. Somewhere, not all that deep inside, I know it’s too much, all this worry for a woman I just met and barely know, but I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t stop thinking of her face when she told me about the gun.

Xander had a gun. Thomas had instructions to print a gun. Is it the same gun, or are there two guns floating around somewhere?

It’s not in the house; I know that for a fact. By now it’s Sunday evening and I’ve searched the place more times than I’d like to count, rifled through every closet and cubby and drawer, only to come up empty-handed. No 3D-printed gun, no shopping bag containing another cheap bauble, no scribbled note or receipt. Which means exactly nothing, other than that my husband is too smart to leave a paper trail. Whatever Thomas is hiding, whatever evidence there is of his secrets, he’s not brought it into the house.

“Mama?” Sem says, digging a purple crayon from the box.

Sem and I are seated on the floor in the living room, coloring Paw Patrol pictures I printed from the internet. He’s already in his pajamas, already clean and ready for bed. Cartoons flash on theflat-screen, the sounds mingling with those of Martina, cleaning up in the kitchen while Ollie hovers for scraps at her feet. On the other side of the big picture window, the outside lights have been on for hours already, turning the yard into a canvas of golden yellows and bright greens, a zigzagging trail of spotlights on bushes, trees, garden statues.

I pick up a blue crayon, start in on Chase’s cap. “Yes, sweetie.”

“When Floppy gets to come home with me, can we take him to the American bookstore?”

At that, I exchange the crayon for my glass of wine. Floppy is the stuffed bunny his class adopted at the beginning of the school year, a classroom “pet” they get to bring home in turns. The last time Floppy came home in Sem’s book bag, Ollie chewed off one of his googly eyes, and Martina had to scour the booths that line the Albert Cuyp Market until she found one that matched. I was really hoping summer break would come sooner than Floppy’s next sleepover.

“Sure. But when will that be?”

“I don’t know, but Mama,luister.”Listen. He waves a hand in front of my face like I so often do with him. It’s how I know what he’s about to say is important. “I want a Floppy for my birthday. Arealone.”

A real bunny, one that will chew the fringe off Thomas’s antique carpets and leave little pellets of shit like a trail of breadcrumbs through the house. There’s no way Thomas will ever agree to a bunny, and yet I’m already thinking about where to get one. The mothers at school would know, or maybe Ollie’s vet. I bury my nose in my glass of wine and wonder how long it will be before Thomas notices a pet bunny. I think of him coming out of the Conservatorium, the cheap trinket he hung for her on that bike, and I wonder if Sem and I will still be living here by the time his fifth birthday rolls around.

It’s a depressing thought, one that beats like a swarm of frantic bats in my chest. I look around the room, at the furniture and the paintings and the silk rug under my butt. This house, Thomas’s bank account, the way being a Prins opens doors I could never have opened on my own... When you’ve got every luxury you could ever wish for, it’s too easy to forget that these things are not permanent. That nothing is.

I look over at my son, the tabs on his processor strap flapping behind his ears as he colors a chunk of brown dog. Up to $100,000 a pop, that’s what those little suckers cost, and yes, insurance would have paid for all that back in the States, assuming I had some. But what about all the co-pays? The years of audiological rehab and mapping appointments and speech therapies that hestillneeds? Icould never have afforded that all on my own. I needed Thomas to foot those bills—Istilldo.

Ollie is the first to hear it, the buzz of Thomas coming through the door. With a startled chuff, he sprints out of the kitchen for the door, his nails slipping against the marble in the hallway. Sem’s eyes go wide with delighted surprise. Thomas hasn’t made it home for dinner in... I can’t remember how long.

“Papaaaaaaa!” Sem tosses down his crayons and jumps to his feet, racing out of the room.

I’m draining my wine when I realize it’s not one set of adult footsteps coming down the hall, but two. Thomas and another man, a stranger in dark pants and a fitted shirt. He pauses in the doorway, his gaze taking in the coloring pages spread across the table, me sitting cross-legged on the floor, a bouquet of colorful crayons in a fist.

The man comes across the carpet to shake my hand. “Arie Boomsma. Sorry to disturb.”

My heart gives a hard kick, then rolls into a rushing gallop. Boomsma. This is the detective Rayna mentioned, the one who’sbeen questioning her. The one she talked to at the funeral. The one who told her about the gun.

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