Page 65 of The Expat Affair

“Thanks for saving my ass yet again, Lars, but I gotta go.” Ipush up from the chair, and the sudden motion makes me lightheaded. The world tilts, and I fall back to the seat, waiting for the earth to settle.

If Lars notices there’s something wrong, he doesn’t let on. He settles his half-drunk beer onto the table and stuffs his hands into his coat pockets. “I realize I don’t know you all that well, but youseem smart. No, not just smart. What’s the word for someone who takes advantage of a situation? Like something unexpected happens and they see their chance and grab it.”

“Opportunistic?” I frown. That doesn’t sound very nice.

He pulls a hand from his pocket to snap in my direction, then stuffs it back in. “Opportunistic. That’s right. Is that what happened, Rayna? You saw an opportunity and you took it?”

I tell myself that Lars could be talking about anything. That things often get lost in translation and this could be one of those times. Or maybe I just heard him wrong. Maybe I misunderstood. A buzzing in my brain is making it hard to think.

“What are you talking about?”

“You really don’t know? Come on, Rayna. I think you do.”

Something about the way he says it has my memories racing back to the night we met. Yes, he was the first to speak, but he was already standing there, trying to get the bartender’s attention when I stepped up beside him, begging for a drink. When he mentioned the bar across the street, I’m the one who suggested food. I practically invited myself.

“No,” I whisper. “I really don’t know.”

Or maybe I do. Maybe I made it easy for him.

He shifts his chair, picking it up by all four legs and turning it on the bricks. He leans closer, and I see it so clearly, the way danger flits across his expression before it disappears. “Where are the diamonds, Rayna? Tell me where they are and I’ll let you go. I’ll let you get back to your sad little life.”

“My life’s not sad.” It’s a stupid thing to latch on to, but I feel strangely defensive of the things I’ve done, all the decisions I’ve made that brought me to right here right now, freezing my ass off on a terrace in Amsterdam. I’ve done some sad things, and that includes trusting this man, but my life’s not sad. “I don’t know where the diamonds are. The killer took them.”

“That would be very unfortunate.”

I don’t know what to say to that—unfortunate for who? I don’t dare to ask—so I say nothing at all.

Music kicks in from nowhere. Loud, bass-led house moving closer, drowning out the noises on the street and battering in my brain like a jackhammer. An electric bike zooms down the center of the street, a portable speaker strapped to the handlebars. It weaves in and out of the tram tracks, sending the pedestrians scattering. The sounds beat in my brain as their bodies go in and out of focus. I shake my head, trying to shake the fuzziness from my vision, but it sticks like a thick fog.

“You’re wasting my time,” Lars says. “Tell me where the diamonds are. We don’t have very long.”

“Long before what?” I say, even though I already know the answer. I know from the way my tongue can’t quite wrap itself around the words, the way a sudden surge of nausea pushes up from somewhere deep and gathers in a sour ball at the back of my throat. I know exactly what’s happening here.

“Time to go,” he says, heaving me out of my chair. The second I’m upright, the world tilts. The terrace, the square, the Bulldog across the street, it all turns upside down. I stumble to my left, almost knocking over a chair. Lars catches me, holding me up with a strong arm.

“Jeez, lady, watch out, yeah?” someone from the next table says, a Brit.

Lars clamps me to his torso. “Sorry. She’s a little overserved. Come on, baby, let’s get you home so you can sleep it off.”

The Brit laughs. “Good luck, mate. She’s sloshed.”

I shake my head against Lars’s shoulder as he tugs me toward the street. I’m not sloshed, and I’m definitely not okay.

I blink and I’m on a bridge. I don’t remember getting here or even crossing the street, but I see the water and the bridge and Lars,tugging me into the back of a cab, and I know this feeling. I’ve felt it once before, my sophomore year, halfway through a Kappa Sigma party. It was the drunkest I’ve ever been, even though I’d only had one beer.

“No,” I try to say, but it comes out like a moan.

The cabbie tosses me a dirty look and pulls away from the curb.

That motherfucker roofied me.

It’s my last coherent thought before everything goes black.

Willow

It’s midmorning when I step off the tram at the Prinsengracht bridge and walk the few short blocks through a steady rain. An excursion to get my mind off an impossible situation, to fill the empty hours while Sem is at school with something other than worry about the state of my marriage. When my alarm woke me this morning, Thomas was already gone.

The canal on my left shimmers in the freezing air, the rain slapping the water with a million tiny splashes. I huddle under my umbrella and hug the houses to my right, ancient structures that have had centuries to settle on their foundations and now lean every which way, a messy but charming jumble of step-stone facades. Dancing houses, they call the ones on the water near Central Station, and these are just as lopsided.

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