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But it’s not my voice that said it.
I touch my fingers to my throat to be sure.
“Willem!”
I hear the voice again. And then I see the blur of movement. A young woman races out from the crowd. The flowers she is carrying drop to the ground as she hurls herself into his arms. And he takes her in. He lifts her off the ground, holds her tight. His arms clutch into her auburn hair, laughing at whatever it is she’s whispering into his ear. They spin around, a tangle of happiness. Of love.
I stand there rooted, watching this very private public display. Finally, someone comes up to Willem and taps him on the shoulder, and the woman slides to the ground. She picks up the flowers—sunflowers, exactly what I would’ve chosen for him—and dusts them off. Willem slides an easy arm around her and kisses her hand. She snakes her arm around his waist. And I realize then that I wasn’t wrong about the love wafting off him during the performance. I was just wrong about who it was for.
They walk off, so close I can feel the breeze as he passes by. We are so close, but he’s looking at her, so he doesn’t see me at all. They go off, hand in hand, toward a gazebo, away from the fray. I just stand there.
I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. It’s Wolfgang. He looks at me, tilts his head to the side. “Finished?” he asks.
I look back at Willem and the girl. Maybe this is the French girl. Or someone altogether new. They are sitting facing each other, knees touching, talking, holding hands. It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. That’s how it felt when I was with him last year. Maybe if an outsider saw us then, that’s exactly how we would’ve looked. But now I’m the one who’s the outsider. I look at them again. Even from here, I can tell she is someone special to him. Someone he loves.
I wait for the fist of devastation, the collapse of a year’s worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. But when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.
I give one last glance toward Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. “Finished,” I say.
But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I’m just beginning.
Thirty-nine
I wake up to bright blinking sunlight. I squint at the travel alarm. It’s almost noon. In four hours, I’m leaving. Wren has decided to stay on a few more days. There’s a bunch of weird museums she just found out about that she wants to see, one devoted to medieval torture, another to handbags, and Winston has told her that he knows someone who can teach her how to cobble shoes, which might keep her here another week. But I have three days left, and I’ve decided to go to Croatia.
I won’t get there till tonight, and I’ll have to leave first thing Monday morning to make my flight back home. So I’ll have just one full day there. But I now know what can happen it just one day. Absolutely anything.
Wren thinks I’m making a mistake. She didn’t see Willem with the redhead, and she keeps arguing that she could be anyone—his sister, for instance. I don’t tell her that Willem, like me, like Wren herself now, is an only child. All last night, she begged me to go to the party, to see how it played out. “I know where it is. Robert-Jan told me. It’s on, oh, I can’t remember the street name, but he said it means ‘belt’ in Dutch. Number one eighty-nine.”
I’d held up my hand. “Stop! I don’t want to go.”
“But just imagine,” she’d said. “What if you’d never met Willem before, and Broodje invited us to the party, and we went, and you two met there for the first time and fell in love? Maybe that’s what happens.”
It’s a nice theory. And I can’t help but wonder if that would’ve happened. Would we fall in love if we met today? Had I really fallen in love with him in the first place? Or was it just infatuation fueled by mystery?
But I’m also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I’m on wasn’t to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.
I’m getting dressed when Wren opens the door, clutching a paper bag. “Hi, sleepyhead. I made you some breakfast. Or rather Winston did. He said it’s very Dutch.”
I take the bag. “Thanks.” I look Wren, who’s grinning like crazy. “Winston, huh?”
Now she’s blushing. “He just got off work and he’s going to take me for a bike ride and introduce me to his cobbler friend as soon as you leave,” she says, her grin now threatening to split her face. “And tomorrow he says I have to go to an Ajax football game with him.” She pauses to consider. “It wasn’t on my list, but you never know.”
“No, you don’t. Well, I should go soon. Let you get to your, um, cobbling.”
“But your flight’s not for ages yet.”
“That’s okay. I want to leave enough time, and I hear the airport is amazing.”
I pack up the rest of my things and go downstairs with Wren. Winston points me toward the train station.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you to the station or the airport?” Wren asks.
I shake my head. I want to see Wren ride away on the pink bike as if I’ll see her again tomorrow. She hugs me tight and then kisses me three times like the Dutch do. “Tot ziens,” she calls. “It means ‘see you later’ in Dutch, because we aren’t saying good-bye.” I swallow the lump in my throat. And then Winston gets on his big black bike and Wren gets on the little pink bike, and they pedal away.
I hoist my backpack up and make the short walk to the train station. There are trains every fifteen minutes or so to Schiphol, and I buy a ticket and a cup of tea and go sit under the clattering destination board to eat my breakfast. When I see what’s inside, I have to laugh. Because Winston has made me a hagelslag sandwich. For all our talk, I never did get to try this particular delicacy.
