“Leaving,” I say, panting with the exertion. I’m not entirely sure I can get out of here, but I know I cannot stay.
“Now? It is late.” She looks incredulous. Until I step in my jeans. It is a painstakingly slow process, and it gives her time to digest the fact that I am, in fact, going. I can see what will happen: the reprise of the last time I was here. A stream of cursing, in French. I am a prick. I have humiliated her.
“I offered you my bed, me, and you push me out. Literally.” She is laughing, not because it’s funny but because it’s inconceivable.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“But you came to me. Yesterday. Again today. You always come back to me.”
“It was only for a place to leave the suitcase,” I explain. “It was for Lulu.”
The look on her face is different from what it was last time, when she threw the vase at me, after I told her it was time for me to go. That was fury. This is fury before it’s had time to set, raw and bloody. How foolish it was to visit Céline. We could’ve found another place for that suitcase.
“Her?” Céline yells. “Her? She was just some girl. Nothing special! And look at you now! She left you like this. I am always the one you come running to, Willem. That means something.”
I hadn’t taken Céline for one of the ones who wait. “I shouldn’t have come here. I won’t do it again,” I promise. I gather the rest of my things and hobble out of her flat, down the stairs to the street.
A police car flies by, its lights flashing through the finally dark streets, its siren whining: nyeah-nyeah, nyeah-nyeah.
Paris.
Not home.
I need to get home.
Five
SEPTEMBER
Amsterdam
Marjolein’s office is in a narrow canal house off of the Brouwersgracht, the inside of it all white and modern. Bram designed it, calling it one of his “vanity projects.” But there was nothing vain about Bram; that was just his code for not getting paid.
Bram’s day job was designing temporary crisis shelters for refugees, something he believed in but that didn’t challenge his creative side. So he was always on the lookout for ways to exercise his modern sensibilities—like transforming a tired transport barge into a three-story glass, wood, and steel floating palace that was once described as “Bauhaus on the Gracht” in a design journal.
Sara, Marjolein’s assistant, sits behind a clear Lucite table, a vase of white roses on the desk. When I come in, she gives me a nervous smile and slowly rises to take my coat. I lean in to kiss her hello. “Sorry I’m late,” I apologize.
“You’re three weeks late, Willem,” she says, as she ushers me in, accepting a kiss but not eye contact.
I give my best rogue’s grin, even though it pulls at the now-itchy wound on my cheek. “But worth waiting for?”
She doesn’t answer. It was more than two years ago that Sara and I had our moment. I was spending a lot of time in this office then, and she was there, our family attorney’s assistant. When it had first happened, I’d been besotted, Sara the older woman with the doleful eyes and the blue-painted bed. But it didn’t last. It never does.
“Technically, I was only a few days late,” I tell her now. “Marjolein’s the one who delayed us by two weeks.”
“Because she went on holiday,” Sara says, strangely huffy. “Which she had purposely booked for after the closing.”
“Willem.” Marjolein towers in the doorway, naturally tall, and taller yet in the stiletto heels she always wears. She beckons me into her office where Bram’s modern sensibility is everywhere. The messy papers and folders in precarious piles are Marjolein’s contributions.
“So you threw me over for a girl,” Marjolein says, shutting the door behind her.
I wonder how it is that Marjolein can possibly know this. She stares at me, clearly amused by something. “I called back, you know?”
On the train from London to Paris, I’d tried to text Marjolein about my delay, but my phone wouldn’t get a signal and was about to die anyway, and for some reason, I didn’t want to tell Lulu about any of it. So when I’d seen one of the Belgian backpacker girls in the café, I’d borrowed her phone. I’d had to fumble in my backpack for Marjolein’s number in my address book and had wound up spilling coffee all over me and the Belgian girl.
“She sounded pretty,” Marjolein says, with a grin that is both mischievous and scolding at the same time.
“She was,” I say.