What Happens in Amsterdam

Chapter Five

Five

Amsterdam observations, week three:

Every public toilet I’ve encountered—a toilet, not a bathroom, because here it’s only a bathroom if there’s a shower—has the tiniest sink I’ve ever seen with one tap for absolutely freezing water. The old buildings, the modern buildings, there’s no difference. Always a tiny sink. Always cold water.

The preferred dipping sauce for fries is mayo, not ketchup, and it’s impossible to go a block without at least three shops selling them in a giant paper cone. The proper way to eat them is with a miniature fork, which I believe scientifically makes them taste better. After I order them with mayo for the first time, I decide I might prefer it, at least until I order them “speciaal”: with mayo, curry ketchup, and diced onions.

The city is more stunning than any photo or video could capture. The centuries-old architecture, the tilted houses—and everywhere in the Centrum is like that. I’ll come across the most gorgeous building I’ve ever seen, and it’ll be a Burger King. Especially living along the Prinsengracht, I can’t help taking pictures every time the light changes, gazing out at the water where the sun touches the surface, the houseboats moored on either side of the canals. I am wildly lucky to be here , I think every time. None of the photos has particularly great composition—in the never-ending hobby quest, my photography phase of ’17 was short-lived for good reason—but that doesn’t matter.

By the middle of the next week, I’ve begun to truly adjust—real, this-is-my-actual-home-now adjusting. I grocery shop every few days and bring home only what I can carry. No more weekly trips to Trader Joe’s or overstuffed canvas bags jammed into the trunk of my car. Cashiers try Dutch with me when I’m checking out, switching to English after I mumble a Sorry and then Dank je wel, fijne dag , the paltry Dutch phrases I’ve picked up so far.

I’m too cowardly to try my bike again and decide to return it to the subscription shop, so I rely on a pair of Nikes and my OV-chipkaart, the Dutch transit card—because the public transportation here is spectacular . There are trams and buses and trains and a metro, and every time I slide into a seat on one of the sleek blue-and-white trams, I’m overcome with a sense of peace I never felt while stuck in LA traffic.

I hurry inside with the single bag of groceries I picked up on the way home from work, eager for a scheduled video call with Phoebe.

“Hi, hello, I miss you!” she says when she picks up, her dark hair piled on top of her head. She’s wearing this crochet patchwork cardigan that’s nearly part of her DNA—she made it ten years ago and wears it once a week; the thing is indestructible—and gives me an inordinate amount of homesickness. Her store doesn’t open for another hour, and she’s in her office there, surrounded by books, sipping from a mug that says I’M WITH THE BANNED . “Look at you in your cute Dutch apartment! With your cute sweet face! And your hair looks so much better now that it’s grown out a bit, wow. I love it.”

“I can’t take credit for any of the design choices but agree about the hair, thank you for the validation,” I say with a laugh, because my sister’s voice has the power to soothe any amount of stress. “You want a tour?”

“Yes, please,” she says, and I spend the next few minutes bringing her to each room and trying my best to remember all of Wouter’s explanations. Then I settle at the kitchen table, propping the phone on a stack of Dutch cookbooks.

“How are you? How’s Maya? How’s the store?”

“Good, good, and good. We’re collaborating with some local artists for Valentine’s Day and hosting a bookish craft fair—it’s going to be adorable.”

Another pang. “I wish I could be there.”

“I’ll send you a valentine,” she says, taking another sip of coffee. “Maya’s been lucky with the morning sickness, and I swear she’s already glowing. And I know it’s probably too early to buy clothes, but Dan, everything is so precious. I found these tiny overalls at a flea market last weekend with manatees all over them—I’ll send you a picture. It’s criminal that they don’t come in adult sizes.” After I’ve squealed over them, her voice turns a little chillier. “And the question of the moment…How’s Wouter?”

For some reason, hearing her say his name out loud makes my heart lurch in my chest, as though it’s a confirmation that this is really happening. I told her the night I moved in, still trying to make sense of it all, and she was understandably cautious. Thrilled that I wasn’t living in a dungeon anymore, but cautious nonetheless.

Half on instinct, I glance up at the ceiling. “I haven’t seen him much since Friday, actually.”

Just once, when he was locking up his bike when I got home from work yesterday, and we exchanged awkward waves and Can you believe the weather? Sometimes I hear what sounds like a dog scampering around on hardwood floor, but I’ve never seen him outside with one, so we must keep very separate hours.

Despite all my unanswered questions, this can only be a good thing. Once I can afford a place of my own, I’ll be gone, and he’ll find another new tenant who’s only a tenant.

I’ve even seen his upstairs neighbor more frequently, an older man named Hendrik who claims the stairs keep him young. Meanwhile, my LA friends have grown increasingly terrible at answering their texts, to the point where I’m not sure I can blame the time zone anymore—but then again, I haven’t been making much effort, either. Truthfully, they felt distant even before I left.

A few times when the evening quiet turns lonely, I consider messaging Iulia but always stop myself. She seemed settled, seven years in the Netherlands and likely zero desire for an aimless American friend.

I also asked Phoebe not to tell our parents about Wouter. In the years after he left, they’d say they wished they’d done a better job of keeping in touch, though I think they were a little stung that he’d ghosted them. It was one kind of cruelty to end our relationship the way he did, but my parents had never been anything but generous toward him.

While I’m sure they’d be beside themselves that he’s back in a Dorfman’s life, I don’t want them to view him as this Amsterdam savior.

“But he’s been…cordial,” I say to Phoebe after hunting for the right word, trying not to think about the way he stood where I am now and told me I still got tongue-tied. Even after severing our connection, he held on to so many details. “He’s a physiotherapist now, which might be different from a physical therapist? I’ve been meaning to look it up.”

“You know I can never forgive him for what he did to you. He lived with us for a year . He told you he fucking loved you.”

I pull the sleeves of my big gray turtleneck over my hands. It’s a habit I developed in college, when I studied in a library with AC that was always a bit too strong. “Do you think this is some way of trying to make it up to me? He feels sorry for me, and he saw an opportunity?”

Phoebe and I spent so much time trying to decipher that four-sentence rejection text, searching for meaning when there wasn’t any. Maybe he’d met someone else, and this was his way of letting me down easy. Maybe he didn’t think long distance would be worth it.

Or maybe he meant exactly what he said: I need to be with someone who has a little more ambition.

“I can’t tell if that’s nice or insulting. Maybe both,” she says, still sounding uncertain. “Just be careful, okay? He’s still half a stranger at this point, Dan. I don’t mean this cruelly, you know I don’t, but—you don’t really know him anymore.”

“Trust me, we’re not going to have any kind of relationship that goes beyond real estate. I…made that pretty clear to him the other day.”

Phoebe stretches in her chair, calls out hello to someone entering the office. “God, I can’t believe you’ve been there almost a month. How’s your Dutch?”

“Niet goed. I signed up for a class that starts next month.”

“And your job is still sketchy as hell?”

“Two more people quit yesterday. The CEO’s been out of town the whole time I’ve been there, and everyone seems to worship him, although no one can explain to me why he’s supposedly so amazing.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing if you started looking around.”

“Already in progress.” From the little browsing I’ve done, I’ve found American companies with offices in Amsterdam that promise the exact same thing I was doing in Los Angeles, with a much slimmer salary, though most of them are looking for engineers. “Phee, please don’t tell Mom and Dad about the job.”

“I’m sensing a theme here,” she says gently. “Of course.”

I want to be thriving here—I want to learn the language, understand the customs. I thought I’d find myself in Amsterdam, but so far all I’ve found is a relic from my past.

Sometimes I think I can trace this aimlessness back to the beginning of my life. When my mother was rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section at twenty-six weeks pregnant and her impossibly tiny baby later rushed to the NICU, our synagogue rallied around them. There were frozen lasagnas and casseroles, brisket and matzo ball soup. Then there was the fundraising for medical care. The stories on the local news. The prayers—of course, the prayers.

Naturally, I remember none of this, but I’ve seen enough photos of myself in an incubator, wires wrapped around me. When my parents finally brought me home six months later, after surgeries to repair my heart and my lungs, a camera crew followed us. Capturing my parents’ tears and the wide-eyed curiosity on Phoebe’s face.

Everyone swore I was destined for big things. As though that had been the reason I’d survived.

“The miracle baby,” they said, though as I grew older, I started doubting how much I believed in God at all.

“What a beautiful family,” they said, but they had no idea how long it would take me to feel comfortable in my skin.

“She’s meant to do something great,” they said. “We just know it.”

And then I didn’t.

The only remnants of my early foray into the world are my asthma and a lingering sense that I’m not living up to the potential everyone thought I had.

It’s ironic how stunted I usually feel, given how I arrived in the world so early, as if the rest of my life was determined to make up for it. A self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe: my parents treated me like a kid, so I never truly grew up. I’ve spent so long searching for that Big and Meaningful Thing, watching friends find theirs with ease. Nora, a freelance photographer with two kids. Alexis, a talent agent who just started her second round of IVF. Madelyn, who got her dream job in New York and stopped talking to anyone back home.

For a while I even wondered if I was meant to work with books like my sister and spent a summer helping out at the store, and while I liked it, I didn’t have the same knack for finding a customer the perfect recommendation the way she did.

Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one flailing. A late bloomer.

“Hold on, I’m going to start dinner,” I tell Phoebe, reaching into the New Yorker tote I carry with pride despite never having read a full issue of the New Yorker . Inside is a box of penne, a jar of marinara sauce, an aspirational bag of lettuce. I hold a pot under the faucet—but when I turn the tap, no water comes out. Frowning, I wiggle it a few times with no luck.

I grab the phone and head down the hall to the bathroom, trying the tap there—that one works, but even if I’m going to be boiling it, bathroom-water pasta is not exactly appetizing.

“What is it?” Phoebe asks.

“Kitchen sink isn’t working,” I say after running back in and trying it again. With a groan, I set the pot back down on the counter. “I think I need to call Wouter.”

“Ooh, leave me on in the background?”

“I thought we were still mad at him!”

“Yes, but I’m also dying to see what he looks like now. I contain multitudes. Is there anywhere you can secretly mount your phone to take a video?”

“I feel like that might be illegal?”

“Fine, fine. A sneaky photo. Final offer.”

“I say this with only love in my heart: I don’t know if you should be running a business.”

Phoebe cackles. “Bye, love you. Go call your landlord.”

Once I end the call, I pace the kitchen, as though the sink simply needs time to think about what I’ve asked of it. I wait fifteen minutes, and when there’s still no water, I swallow down any remaining vestiges of pride and message him.

Not three minutes later, there’s a knock on my door.

“That was fast,” I say as I open it up, slightly out of breath from dashing down the hall. Maybe I tousled my hair a bit. Maybe I applied more tinted lip balm, but only because I was such a mess the first time he saw me. I want him to know that even if thirty-year-old Dani doesn’t have her shit together, at least she can look the part.

Wouter’s in a light blue button-up with a pen tucked in the pocket, jaw still dusted with stubble—and around his hips is an honest-to-god tool belt.

I draw a hand to my mouth. “ Oh . Oh my god. You have a belt and everything.”

“Is that not the easiest way to carry around tools?”

“No, no, I’m sure it is. Come in.” Even though he knows where it is, I lead him toward the kitchen. “Sorry to bother you. I’m sure this is the last thing you wanted after a full day of work.”

“Part of the job,” he says, testing the faucet a few times. He doesn’t make eye contact as he reaches into the belt for a wrench. “No point paying someone when I can usually figure out what’s going on. I’d do it for any of my tenants.”

There’s an emphasis on that final word. A confirmation that this is all I am to him.

With that, he rolls up his sleeves and kneels to inspect the pipes beneath the sink. Then he turns so he can get on his back, head disappearing and long legs sprawled out on the floor.

“Do you just have to give it a good yank?” I ask in an effort to keep the mood light, shutting my eyes on a cringe the moment I say it.

He stills on the floor. “Something like that.”

An uncomfortable stretch of quiet passes between us.

When he lived with us, I once asked about stereotypes. The Dutch can be very direct , he said, and I’d use it to force confessions out of him, asking how he really felt about a meal my parents made or what I was wearing that day. Even though he’d press his lips together and refuse to give me a straight answer, he was always direct when it came to his feelings for me.

Now that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“It’s kind of funny,” I say, trying again as I lean against the counter across from where he’s working, because I’m nothing if not persistent. Often to my detriment. “Flood in my last place and now the water won’t work in this one. The universe had to restore the balance somehow, I guess.”

“Then maybe you’re secretly Dutch. We’ve always had a contentious relationship with water.”

“Right—the windmills?”

“Yes. Most of them have been replaced by more modern systems, but hundreds of years ago, they were used to pump water back into the rivers to drain the land. About a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level, and back then the country was mostly marshes. Uninhabitable. They were able to turn a lot of that into farmland, which is part of why the Dutch still have the reputation for excellent water management,” he says, and god, that’s a wholesome reputation. “This shouldn’t be too bad. Last month, the pipes froze, and one of them in my apartment burst.”

Surely a tenant and landlord can discuss water management. That’s topical.

Also topical: that the bottom of his shirt has flapped open, exposing a section of his stomach.

Dark blond hair arrows down from his navel, his skin pulled taut over muscles he didn’t have at seventeen. Ridges and valleys I never explored. I saw him shirtless so many times—late nights and stolen moments when I’d drag my hands along his chest, but also on trips to the beach or when he helped my parents in the garden. What’s probably 4 percent of his naked body shouldn’t bring this much heat to my face.

The light glints off his silver belt buckle, as though crafting a cinematic moment just for me. It feels wrong, getting this peek at him while he’s under the sink, and yet right now logic and decorum are meaningless. Because there is a very tall, very attractive man on the floor of my kitchen, one whose body I used to know very well, and from this angle, I catch the slightest glimpse of a waistband beneath his jeans. A stripe of navy.

“You weren’t kidding when you said this place needed work.” I finally force my gaze away from his abdomen. “How’d you learn how to do all of this?”

There’s a strange pause before he answers. “Probably a cliché, but I did some with my dad growing up.” A clearing of his throat. “The rest—YouTube.”

This brings back a memory. “Remember when we spent a whole day watching old Bob Ross painting videos because his voice was so mesmerizing? And then we challenged ourselves to see who could talk like him the longest?”

“Danika—” Wouter lets out a grunt of exertion, the muscles in his forearms flexing. “It’s fine if we don’t talk. You don’t have to force it—I’m just here to do a job.”

“Sure. Yeah. Sorry.” My voice is high-pitched. Unrecognizable.

It’s such a stark reversal from last week, when he was trying to be pleasant and I was the one setting boundaries.

This was what I wanted.

So I give him some space, attempting to keep busy in the kitchen while he works.

“Try it now?” he says after a few more minutes.

I have to step over his legs to get to the sink, and when I turn the tap, water flows freely. “Dutch water management in action. Thank you so much—I’ve never had a full-service landlord.”

And because I am cursed, somehow it comes out sounding suggestive.

He’s still beneath me, half in the process of getting up as scarlet attacks his cheeks, which only sparks another swell of memories: Wouter politely answering my parents’ questions about our classes, becoming sheepish when they told him how impressed they were with his rigorous course schedule. Taking our notebooks to the Getty, sitting in front of our favorite paintings and sketching them for hours, him turning shy when he showed them to me.

Blushing in the back seat of my car, breath hot on my inner thighs as he asked me in a voice that was all desperate wanting: Is this good? Do you like this?

Good was too weak a word, but I didn’t have the right vocabulary for any of it. How could you describe a feeling that split you open and snapped you together at the same time? So I stroked a hand through his hair, grazing the top of his ear, and gave him a feverish yes.

Just like we said the other day: a past life.

“No problem at all,” he says, wiping his hands on a towel from his back pocket before readjusting the tool belt. His face is still hooded, as though he’s making an effort to keep even the slightest emotion locked away. “Let me know if you have any other issues, but hopefully you won’t have to see me again for a while.”

“Right. Hopefully.” Now my voice is the faintest scratch in my throat. I can’t tell if he thinks I don’t want him here or if this is truly how he feels—eager to get away from me.

It shouldn’t bother me. Shouldn’t make my eyes sting. I should be relieved that we’re on the same page, even if it means we’re stuck inside a book with a terrible ending.

Once he’s gone, I drown my agony in sad-girl pasta night, wishing I’d said a hundred other things or maybe nothing at all.

—

The thing about working somewhere unstable is that it’s not actually all that hard to convince yourself the worst won’t happen. It’s what our brains do in most situations—protect us from the truth. CommerX clearly had the money to sponsor my move. They give us prepackaged sandwiches or salads for lunch every day. They can’t possibly be on the verge of going under.

Then on Monday, two more people quit.

On Wednesday, I catch someone sobbing in the bathroom.

The end of the week brings more secretive meetings and hushed conversations, and on Friday afternoon, after another plastic-wrapped ham-and-cheese, Beatriz in accounting slowly packs her bag and slips out of the office. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t looked like she was trying to be sneaky about it, her eyes darting in every direction before she rounded a corner. Ten minutes later, Mehmet in sales does the same thing.

And then it’s a free-for-all.

The twenty other employees are a flurry of jackets and paper and desperation. Mugs are snatched up, plants are inexplicably shoved into backpacks. Some people even break into a sprint as they head for the elevators.

“Get out while you still can!” Anjali in marketing calls to me before she makes a run for it.

I get to my feet, half-eager to flee with the rest of them but unable to make myself without an explanation. “What the—”

“Some unfortunate news.” Charlotte rushes over to my desk with this massive understatement, her usually tidy blond ponytail in a state of subtle disarray. A messenger bag is slung over her shoulder, an extension cord spilling out of it. “The CEO might have made a couple…let’s say unwise financial decisions. We’ve had investors dropping out left and right, and we’ve been trying to get them to stay, but there might be an investigation into some of his behavior. So…” She ends this with a little hiccup of a laugh, as though positive energy will trick me into thinking this isn’t actually all that bad.

“But—but you said all the higher-ups were brilliant.” Somehow my mind hinges on this. As though a brilliant person cannot possibly make a financial mistake.

Charlotte drops a sympathetic hand to my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

Now all the confusion morphs to panic. “Maybe…couldn’t someone else take over?” I ask feebly.

“There isn’t any money, I’m afraid. There, ah, isn’t that much of a company anymore.” She scoops up some extra coffee filters and drops them into her bag. “I wish you the best, really I do. A shame this didn’t work out, but I’m sure you’ll land on your feet!”

By this point, we’re two of the last people left. I half expect the roof to start caving in as I follow Charlotte to the elevator, where she passes a box of Kleenex to a crying colleague.

“Don’t worry,” she tells him. “I’m sure they won’t be able to trace it back to you.”

Maybe it’s a good thing I’m getting out.

At least, that’s how I feel until I’m standing dazed in the middle of Dam Square while tourists and pigeons swarm around me, trying to process the biggest what-the-fuck in a whole month of them. I could surrender myself to the birds. Let them peck out my eyes. It’d probably be less painless.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do now.

I stumble past the line spilling from the TikTok-famous place that sells only one type of cookie, hugging my coat against the wind because of course I haven’t adjusted to this weather yet. My lungs are too tight and I can’t get a full breath, so I close my eyes and make myself pause for a second, rooting around my bag for my inhaler before remembering I left it on the kitchen counter. Not an asthma attack, I realize, just anxiety—although it’s never really just , is it? Four breaths in, hold for seven, release for eight. For a moment I wonder if those doctors who operated on me as a baby didn’t put me back together properly. Maybe my body was just waiting for a disaster before giving up on me, too.

This apparent dissolution of CommerX wasn’t entirely unexpected, but I’m left with hundreds of questions. They sponsored my visa—what happens with it now? A quick google informs me I have ninety days to find a new job before I have to leave the country. In theory, three whole months sounds like plenty of time. But now that I’ve browsed some listings, I’m not so sure it’s enough.

Holy shit.

I might not be able to stay.

“Excuse me?” A family of tourists is standing in front of me. An older grandmother, parents, two kids. The mother is holding out her phone. “Will you take our picture?”

Right. We’re in front of the palace.

“Oh—sure. Of course.”

They pose with broad grins, wind whipping their hair as they press close together, and the sad reality hits me: almost a month, and I have barely taken any of these photos.

I force myself to breathe as I pass back the phone. That ham sandwich isn’t sitting well, so I buy a hot dog from the cart in front of the palace and proceed to spill mustard on my jacket. When I lost my last job, at least I knew I was the one responsible. I wallowed, but then I pulled myself together. I figured it out, even if it meant moving an ocean away from everything I knew.

Escaping.

Is that what I was doing?

In front of me, a pigeon snatches a fry out of a little girl’s cone. She starts crying, and I feel this moment of kinship with her when we make eye contact—because yes, this city is brutal for all of us.

But it’s beautiful, too.

Of all the ways I imagined this going wrong, I never thought being sent back to the US was a real possibility. And there it is. If I don’t find another company to sponsor my visa, then I am fucked.

I allow myself to picture it: packing my bags, crawling to my childhood home because of course my parents would let me stay there while I got back on my feet. No—they’d insist on it. You can come home anytime . They’d fold their arms around me and assure me it’s okay that I wasn’t ready for something this big.

That nameless beast I thought I’d dodged by coming here, the heavy clouds that moved into my brain on my worst days—that would be back, too. Every good thing I imagined for myself when I arrived in Amsterdam would just be…gone. “I lived there for a few months,” I’d tell people with a shrug when they asked about it. “It was cool.”

Because what else could I say, even now? I’ve barely explored beyond the city center. I haven’t been to a single museum, haven’t tried stroopwafel, haven’t traveled .

This can’t be ending when it’s barely begun.

I take a determined bite of my hot dog. If this really was an escape, then there’s only one option.

I have ninety days to find a new job and to experience this city the way someone long ago told me I should, convincing me that once I did, I’d agree it was the loveliest place in the world.