• • •
Speaking of family, Allyson loves watching Willem with Broodje. Not that she needs reassuring exactly, but seeing him with Broodje is reassuring.
“I was going to take you out to eat,” Willem says to her. “But Broodje beat me to it.”
“We can still go if you want,” Allyson says.
“I have to be at the theater in less than an hour,” Willem says. “We can go out after? Just us.”
“Not just you,” Broodje says. “W, Henk, Lien, they’re all coming. And they will all want to meet her.” He nods to Allyson. “You are like the business we all invested in and now you’re paying off so . . . you can be alone later.”
“Wren called, too. The friend I was in Amsterdam with” Allyson says. “She wants to meet up.”
And, Willem thinks, there would also be Kate and her fiancé.
Allyson and Willem look at each other, the invisible chain connecting them pulling hard. Why hadn’t they taken more advantage of those quiet hours this afternoon? Why had they just sat there, her feet in his lap, when there was a perfectly good empty apartment here?
Except Allyson wouldn’t have exchanged those hours with Willem for anything in the world.
And neither would Willem.
• • •
All too quickly, they part again. Willem will go ahead to his call at the theater. Wren is meeting Allyson and Broodje at the flat. Everyone will meet at the park, and after the play, they will all celebrate.
Saying good-bye is less fraught this time. They have done it now once, like normal people: leave, come back. It builds confidence.
This time Willem kisses her good-bye. It is quick, a peck on the lips. It is not nearly enough. He wants all of her. From her lips to her feet.
“I’ll see you after the play,” Allyson says.
“Yes,” Willem says.
But they both know they will see each other sooner than that. That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.
• • •
Wren arrives not long after Willem has left. She squeals and hugs Allyson, squeals and hugs Broodje. She kisses the saints on her bracelet. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She kisses all the saints. They all came through.
“I knew it,” Wren says in that fluty voice of hers. “But I thought you were going to find him on the train, like you did the last time.”
“I sort of found him at the train station,” Allyson says. And then she explains how she’d been about to catch the train to the airport when she’d opened the packed breakfast Winston, the guy from their hotel, had made for her. And it was the hagelslag that did it. The bread with chocolate sprinkles, the very first thing she and Willem had talked about. It had been the sign, the accident, the nudge to go to Willem.
“How did you know where to find him?” Wren asks
“Because you told me the address, and that the name of the street was a belt.”
Wren turns to Broodje. “You told me that.”
“Foreigners can never remember Ceintuurbaan otherwise,” he says.
“As opposed to the many other pronounceable street names here?” Allyson asks.
They all laugh.
They clean up the mess from the snacks and prepare to make their way to Vondelpark. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Allyson knows she has a flight home out of London tomorrow, at 4:00. She will have to figure out how to get there. She has a few hundred dollars left. If she has to blow it on the fast Eurostar train, so be it. It was a last-minute impromptu decision to go to Paris from London that had gotten this entire ball rolling. It took two hours to get from one world to another. She is fairly confident she’ll be able to get back in time.