What Happens in Amsterdam

Chapter Three

Three

Wouter van Leeuwen, my first love and first everything, is staring back at me, our bikes twisted in a heap between us. Broad shoulders fill out his raincoat, his gray Blundstones scuffed with age. He is almost the boy I remember—a swish of blond hair, darker at the roots, with far more stubble along his jaw than he had at seventeen. Deep hazel eyes, the kind he could render so beautifully in a self-portrait while I struggled to get their color just right. Round metal-rimmed glasses dotted with rain, slightly askew. The faintest freckles along his nose.

This can’t be real life, and yet it’s the only thing in the past two weeks that’s made any amount of sense. Tiny Dutch pancakes and dogs in bicycle baskets? Completely fake.

Wouter van Leeuwen, with his soft mouth and baffled gaze, the boy— man —I’ve never been able to forgive?

So painfully, perfectly real .

He blinks himself out of the daze before I do, extending one large hand to pull me to my feet, then hauls both our bikes to the sidewalk with all the swiftness of a ball boy at Wimbledon.

“What are you doing here?” he asks once we’re no longer blocking traffic. Now his voice slips into the coziest memory centers of my brain. I should have recognized it immediately—even with thirteen years between then and now, I never thought I’d forget the sound of the first voice to utter I love you .

In English, and then in Dutch.

I hug my jacket tighter, but I can’t decide if I’m too warm or too cold. “Trying to run you off the road, apparently.” The joke doesn’t have the right amount of humor to it. I’m too in shock, and my whole right leg is screaming with pain. “I’m—holy shit. Sorry. Trying to wrap my mind around this.”

Wouter van Leeuwen still lives in Amsterdam. Wouter van Leeuwen is here , right in front of me, after the promises we made and his heartless breakup and before that, the relationship we couldn’t tell anyone about.

Despite all the chaos I’ve caused in the span of five minutes, he breaks into a grin. Like he’s happy to see me, when the feeling coursing through my body is more along the lines of panic and dread, with a sprinkling of unresolved conflict on top. “You look…” He trails off, as though realizing exactly how I look—like I was just fished out of a canal—and then blushes when his blatant assessment of me lasts a beat too long. “Wow,” he finishes, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. “How long are you visiting?”

“I live here,” I say. “I got a job at a startup. Just finished my first week.”

Now the grin slides into an expression of pure disbelief. “You’re serious? You live here, in Amsterdam? Holy shit is right. There’s a café I like on this next street. Let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me all about it?”

He locks his bike to a rack and does the same with mine, and then I am following Wouter van Leeuwen down the block, limping on my injured leg while he shakes his head and mutters, “Danika Dorfman. I can’t believe it.”

The café is styled like a living room, with plush mismatched furniture, a bookshelf-lined wall, and mellow eighties rock playing in the background. Wouter asks the server for something in Dutch as we grab an empty table in the corner, and she returns with an ice pack, two waters, and a few bandages.

“I’m okay, really,” I say, fully aware that I’m bleeding from at least three places, but Wouter just lifts his eyebrows at my shredded work slacks. I relent, holding the ice pack to my knee while I push damp hair out of my face with my other hand. I have a medium amount of vanity now that my birthmark and I aren’t constantly at war, but every time I imagined seeing Wouter again, I looked much hotter than I do now. And I had definitely showered.

I’ve tested so many comebacks on him in my head, mentally cursed him out like I was casting a spell. A decade may have passed, but every relationship I’ve had, every time I’ve second-guessed myself—it all comes back to the year we spent wholly obsessed with each other.

And yet the words that leave my lips are “Are you hurt?” Because even if I’m bitter, that crash was absolutely my fault.

“A couple scrapes.” He rubs his glasses lenses along his shirt to dry them. “I’ve had worse.”

God , I’m still processing the absurdity of him sitting across from me, trying to reconcile this man with the boy I used to know. His details are slow to come into focus, a pencil drawing coming to life. Once I’ve started breathing again and sipped some water, I can properly take him in.

He was cute at seventeen, with a single dimple and glasses he was always forgetting to wear so he went without them sometimes, squinting down at his sketchbook. You’re going to get a wrinkle right there , I’d say, pressing my thumb between his brows, and he’d grab my thumb and bring it to his lips. Now there’s no denying it—he is beautiful , especially once he takes off his jacket, revealing a green button-up that brings out that color in his eyes. The rough hair along his jaw and chin is flecked with gray and, combined with the faintest lines at the edges of his eyes, makes him look mature, settled in his skin. I once dotted those light freckles with paint, turning his face into a work of art even though it already was. And his hands—I fell so hard for his hands.

Time has only been unkind to him in the way his hair is thinning in the back. I can’t help wondering if he’s self-conscious about it, but it doesn’t seem to have affected his confidence. There’s an ease to him I’m instantly jealous of, long legs spread as he leans back in his chair.

It’s the cruelest thing he could do—have the nerve to look this good, this comfortable , after all these years.

My parents had always wanted to host a foreign exchange student, loved the idea of learning from them as much as they’d be learning from us. When I was seventeen and Phoebe was in college, they filled out all the applications and attended all the seminars, and then they were matched with a student from the Netherlands.

Wouter and I were the same age, and he immediately struck me as different from the boys I went to school with. Older, somehow. I tried to imagine living in the same place Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Vermeer once did, captivated by all that creative energy in such a small country. The sheer amount of independence he’d grown up with floored me; he traveled everywhere by bike and had for years, often alone and never with a helmet. My parents couldn’t get over that part, no matter how many times Wouter told them that’s just how it was in the Netherlands.

The more time we spent together, the more I realized my feelings were deeper than simply finding him interesting. I couldn’t stop thinking about his messy hair and soft accent and ink-smudged hands. His shirt hem would brush mine as we passed each other in the hall, and my heart would leap into my throat. I’d doze off on the couch in the middle of my homework, and he’d drape a blanket over me. It was torture, the fact that he was sleeping in the room across from mine, only a few feet away. Off-limits.

But I swore I’d never act on it. My parents would have grounded me until I was sixty, and I assumed Wouter didn’t want to jeopardize his program by hooking up with his host parents’ daughter. And yet—those feelings didn’t go away. I wore my shortest shorts around the house, took him to my favorite places in LA, stayed up late watching movies with him. If we couldn’t be together, I reasoned, then at least we could be inseparable.

One December evening when he was studying and no one else was home, I knocked on the door of his room. There were doodles in the margins of his notes. A sunset. A knight on horseback. “Do me,” I said, summoning all my courage as I stood next to his desk, presenting my arm. He blushed, tapped the pen on his chin a few times before lowering it. The tip skated over my skin from freckle to freckle, curved lines forming the swell of the ocean. A ballpoint blue tidal wave.

“What do you think?” he asked as I gazed down at it. He was still touching me, his thumb moving in circles on my palm, and I was done for. The rest of the night unfolded in dizzy snapshots: my hand on his jaw, his fingertips skimming up my bare legs. We kissed until the garage door rumbled beneath us, and when I got into bed that night, I clutched my tattooed forearm close to my chest.

I knew we shouldn’t—but for the next six months, we did.

“Wow,” he says again now, after the server drops off a couple beers. “How are you doing? Aside from the crash, of course.” His English still has that slight Dutch accent, giving his words round edges.

My stomach twists with long-buried frustration. Before he left LA, we’d made a plan. In all our starry-eyed optimism, we thought we’d do long-distance until we could reunite. Maybe I’d study abroad or he would, or we’d spend summer and winter breaks together. The geography was inconvenient, but we were determined to figure it out.

Then, a few days after he got home, enough time for the jet lag to settle his brain, he sent me the too-short text that sliced my life into a Before and After.

Now that I’m back, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m just not sure it’s going to work. I need to be with someone who has a little more ambition. I’m so sorry. Thanks for everything.

As though thanking me somehow made it okay. I’d be so touched by his politeness I’d forget what he was really saying.

Thanks for everything.

Six months of secrecy, and he didn’t even have the guts for a phone call—I tried and tried, and he never picked up. He couldn’t say it to my fucking face, which must have meant I didn’t matter to him the way he mattered to me.

The heartbreak was a vicious, all-consuming thing. I remember bursting into Phoebe’s dorm room at USC, tears dripping down my face, and she swaddled me in a blanket and slowly rocked me back and forth until I stopped crying.

I vowed I’d never let someone else control my emotions that way again. By the first week of school, I was dating a JV soccer player I’d dumped by homecoming because I could sense him losing interest. To this day, I’ve always been the one to end a relationship before the other person can decide they’re through with me. Anything to prevent feeling that hollow.

Wouter took the coward’s way out—but he was exactly right. He was the one with all the ambition, buoyed by his parents’ high expectations, while for my parents, sometimes it seemed like it was enough that I was alive. No pressure to achieve, a shrug and you’ll do better next time when I got the occasional B-minus. I flitted from hobby to hobby and all they did was smile and clap.

I was adrift, and most days it feels like I haven’t changed at all.

“I’m…yeah.” Apparently, that’s the best way to describe it. How do you catch up with someone when it’s been that long? When they were this vital part of your life and then they were suddenly just…gone? I clear my throat and try again. “The past couple weeks have been interesting.”

“You said you’re here for work?”

With a nod, I readjust the ice pack. “I’m a UX designer at a fintech startup.”

“What are the odds you’d end up in Amsterdam after all this time?” His initial excitement has worn off, replaced by something fidgety. Whenever his hands used to twitch in his lap the way they’re doing now, I thought it was because he didn’t have them wrapped around a Faber-Castell. Now I’m wondering if it’s because he realizes how untidy our ending was.

Two baskets arrive at the table, and Wouter seems thrilled to have something to do. He gestures to the fried balls of dough in one of them. “Traditional Dutch snacks. Bitterballen, and these are kaasstengels—cheese sticks. I hope you like fried food.” Then something seems to occur to him. “But you always preferred sweets, right? I can order—”

“This is fine.” Even though it’s true that I’d rather have dessert at any time of day, it’s almost unsettling that he remembers this about me. He should have forfeited his right to those details, however trivial, the moment he decided it was over.

I bite into one of the bitterballen, and though it nearly burns my tongue, it’s so good I don’t care. Savory and warm with the perfect crunch. He nudges a small cup of mustard my way, and the next bite is even better, even if it’s underscored by an awkward silence.

“I have to admit, I’ve spent all these years thinking you’d come at me with an axe if we ever saw each other again,” he says.

“Nope, just a bike.”

A groan mixes with a laugh as he pushes a hand into his forehead, jostling his glasses. “I was seventeen and an idiot. I would have deserved it.”

I wait for more, surprised he’s bringing it up, because seventeen and an idiot doesn’t make up for anything. We were certainly old enough to call it love.

“Then again,” he says, his eyes on his drink. “Clearly that relationship was not…what either of us thought it was.”

I choke on a Dutch cheese stick, certain I heard him wrong.

Not what either of us thought it was.

He was the one who hurt me , and he’s lamenting that the relationship didn’t measure up to his expectations?

“That’s just what happens when two idiots get together, I guess!” I say it as brightly as I can, even forcing a gritted smile, as though we’re competing for whose heart shattered into more pieces. There’s no world in which he has a claim to the title. Not when he’s the one who swung the hammer. “But hey, that was a long time ago. Good thing we grew up.”

I want so badly to press for more of an explanation, but I don’t know how to do it without proving him right: that I’m still the unsteady, uncertain girl he knew back then.

“Exactly. No need to dwell on the past.”

Okay, then. This was never going to be an excavation of our relationship when we haven’t spoken in so long. We’ll have a polite, superficial catch-up and then go our separate ways. I’ll limp back to my dungeon, and he’ll swagger home to a tall Dutch girlfriend who makes riding a bike look effortless.

Or wife.

Or children.

Jesus. He could really be anyone.

“So,” I say, tugging the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, still cold from the ice pack. “What about you? What do you…do?”

He dunks a bitterbal into mustard, and it doesn’t escape my notice that both of us are doing our best not to double-dip. “I’m a physiotherapist.”

I almost have to ask him to repeat it—that’s how much of a record scratch it is. If anything could interrupt my mental rewiring of Wouter van Leeuwen, it’s this. Every other memory I have of him is wrapped in his love of art. One of the reasons he’d sought out the exchange program was to bolster his university applications, and it was clear his parents didn’t think art was worth the time he spent on it. They wanted him in a steady career, something with a stable paycheck. They’d lived in Amsterdam for so long and rubbed elbows with the city’s most powerful families, the ones that could trace their histories back to medieval times. They wanted to be able to brag about their doctor or lawyer or engineer, not their starving artist.

I was doggedly optimistic about it, so enraptured by his talent. If anyone could make it in an unpredictable creative field, it would be him.

“You went to school for that? Physiotherapy?”

“Both my bachelor’s and master’s.” When I look impressed, he adds, “It’s more common to have a master’s degree here. Very affordable.”

“Affordable higher education, wonder what that’s like.” Another forced smile. “Your parents must be proud. That was what they always wanted, right? Something important like that?”

I don’t intend for the words to be wrapped in barbed wire, but maybe that’s how they sound to him, because he suddenly tenses, his mouth forming a hard line.

“Right,” he says in a strange hollow tone. When he glances away, his lashes brush the lenses of his glasses. “They are.”

I still have a million questions: Why did you change your mind? and Why did you give up art? and Did you ever miss me? Because I missed you, for much longer than I’d like to admit.

“You live nearby?” I ask instead. Keeping it surface. Safe.

“Just a few streets away, on the Prinsengracht.”

“I want to say I know where that is, but…”

He laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. It’s too polite, not one of his pure and genuine laughs, the kind that would shake his shoulders, make him hide his face because he didn’t know if he was supposed to find something funny. Me, dragging his chin up so I could look at him, especially the dimple that only popped when it was a true laugh. Let me see you , I’d say.

“The canals all have names here,” Wouter says. “Prinsengracht is one of the main ones—it means ‘Prince’s Canal.’?”

“File that under basic facts I probably should have known by now.”

“It’s a hard adjustment,” he says. “I should know, given I did the same thing in reverse. How are your parents? And Phoebe?”

I think about what my parents said on the phone earlier this week. You can come home anytime. As though waiting for me to decide that Amsterdam is too much.

“They’re all good. My parents have gotten really into kayaking, so that’s how they spend most of their weekends. We all thought they were going to buy one and it would just sit in the garage, but they’ve proven us wrong. Phoebe’s running an independent bookstore and loving it. She got married a few years ago, and her wife is pregnant.”

“Happy to hear that. Congratulations to them.” He watches me pick up the ice pack again, shifting it from my knee to my hip. “I could take a look at your leg, if you want.” It takes a moment to dawn on me why he’s offering: physiotherapist.

“No!” I say it so loudly that a few heads swivel our way. “You don’t have to. I’m sure I’m fine. A bruise or two, nothing major.”

An adult Wouter examining my adult body is not something I have the mental capacity for right now. Especially with the way he’s grown into his long limbs, with hands that could probably soothe an ache the way they used to sketch out a landscape, right before he’d lick his index finger to turn the page.

They used to explore my legs, my waist, my hips, with the same careful determination. Thumb on my jaw. Palm on my stomach.

“I don’t know if I’m destined to become a serious cyclist,” I continue, fighting a blush that my brain in no way sanctioned. These fucking memories. “Actually…none of this has been what I expected so far, if I’m being honest. And not just the biking. I don’t want to insult your city or anything, but…”

A frown deepens the line between his brows, just like I warned him about when we were seventeen. “What do you mean?”

“Well…” Before rational thought can intervene, all of it spills out. “My job has mostly been grunt work, and I’m not sure there’s anyone else on my team. And—my apartment flooded last night.”

He pauses with his beer halfway to his mouth. “Shit. Are you okay?” he asks. “And all your things? Well, they’re not nearly as important, but, you know—they still matter.”

“I managed to save most of them, but I’m not sure I can keep living there. I’m just wondering how anyone finds an apartment here. Some of these don’t even include the floor , apparently?” Because I might as well get some advice, I swipe through my phone and show him a listing that says UNFURNISHED, UNUPHOLSTERED . “What does that mean? How is that possible?”

Wouter doesn’t seem fazed by this. “Yes, that’s not uncommon. Obviously there’s something underneath you, but it’s just concrete. People buy their own flooring—hardwood, laminate, carpet—and then take it to their next apartment when they move out.”

“Do you have to bring your own toilet, too?”

His eyebrows shoot to his hairline as he barks out a laugh. “No, that’s ridiculous.”

“I’m glad my agony is hilarious to you,” I say, dragging a hand down my face with a groan. “Because I feel like the most pathetic American. Just give me an Uncle Sam hat and a bucket of hot wings, because there’s no way I’m ever blending in here.”

The laughter stops, and he shakes his head. He’s quiet for a while; his features look as though he’s waging some inner battle. He places a finger on his beer glass, drawing a design in the condensation, keeping his eyes there instead of on me. “Danika…I might be able to help you out, actually.”

Danika.

He’s said it a couple times now, but for some reason, it’s only this time that it truly registers. He was the only one who ever called me by my full name, whispering it into my skin with a sweetness that could crack me in half. Danika, Danika, Danika. Ik hou van jou.

I swallow hard, trying to push all of that away. The images are too vivid, those versions of ourselves still locked in time.

“My last tenant had to move on short notice, so…I have an apartment. My family owns the building.”

“I couldn’t—I couldn’t stay with you,” I say, unable to process what he’s telling me.

“No, I rent it out.” His finger, still inching up the glass. “Fully furnished, so most of my tenants end up being expats. I live upstairs. Entirely separate entrance.”

I vaguely recall hearing about this. Back then, the Netherlands seemed this idyllic, fairy-tale place: tulips, windmills, Wouter. My parents occasionally talked about doing a family trip to Europe, but it took them years to pay off my medical bills, and then years after that to get stable again, which left me with a not insignificant amount of guilt.

Wouter slides his phone from his pocket, pulls up some photos of a charming ground-floor unit.

“There’s no way I could afford that.”

“I’ll give you the pathetic-American discount.” The dimple makes its first appearance. Slight, but it’s there. “Although I don’t think you’re pathetic at all. Unlucky, maybe, but luck always turns around.”

I’m inclined to keep brushing him off, because surely this is ridiculous, renting a room from the guy who lived across the hall from me during the best, then worst, year of my life. Then again, I’m low on options. None of my other ex-boyfriends are offering up lovely fully furnished apartments.

“And you’d be…my landlord?”

“Yes, that’s how it works.” Then his brow furrows with an expression I can’t quite interpret—concern, maybe. It’s been too long since I was able to read his face. “I wouldn’t intrude on your privacy or anything. I’m fairly hands-off unless one of my tenants needs something.” His eyes finally meet mine for a long moment, enough for a shiver to climb my spine that I could easily attribute to the slowly melting ice pack. “You’d barely even see me.”

Something like hope hovers in my chest. “Well then,” I say, downing the last of my beer. Fate or karma or simple coincidence—I’d be an idiot to say no without seeing it first. “I guess I can take a look.”