There is news to share. They each share it.
Willem, in a rush, texts Kate, whom he just saw a few hours ago when she was on her way to meet her fiancé at the airport. She was bringing him to meet Willem so Willem could get his seal of approval to join their theater group.
I have big news, he writes. I’m Orlando tonight.
He writes a version of the same to Broodje, who, along with Henk is helping W move into a new flat with his girlfriend, Lien. He knows all of them will get the message and all of them will come, even though they all came last night, because that is how his friends are.
He is riding his bike to the theater when he realizes that they will all think the big news is that he was given one more chance to do Orlando. Though in reality, he was fired. He is going on tonight out of necessity. He can almost taste Petra’s disgust at having to put him back on the stage.
>Willem folds the letter, carefully, like it is sacred text. “I am, too.”
He hands the letter back to Allyson. She shakes her head. “I wrote it to you.”
He knows exactly where he will keep it. With the photo of him and Yael and Bram from his eighteenth birthday. With the photo of Saba and Saba’s sister, Willem’s great aunt Olga, who, like this letter, he only recently discovered had existed. This letter from Allyson will join the important things, thought lost, now found.
“I still don’t understand,” Willem says. “I went to the house on Bloemstraat last month and the letter wasn’t there.”
“That’s weird,” Allyson says. “Saskia and Anamiek never mentioned seeing you.”
“Who are they?” Willem asks.
“They live there.”
“Ahh. Well, I didn’t meet them. I let myself in with my key.”
Allyson laughs. “That explains it. They didn’t know you, either, though they knew of you. And also . . .” She pauses and then forces herself to finish. “Ana Lucia.”
“Ana Lucia?” Willem asks. He has not thought much about her since their spectacular blowout before Christmas last year. “What about Ana Lucia?”
“I met her.”
“You met Ana Lucia?”
Allyson remembers the girl’s fury. Another student at Ana Lucia’s college had told Allyson that Willem had been cheating on Ana Lucia with a French girl all along. When she’d heard that, it had seemed to confirm everything bad Allyson suspected about him.
“How did that go? Willem asks.
“Well, she didn’t punch me.”
Willem winces. “She wasn’t so happy to see you,” he says.
“I didn’t get it. I’d never even met her before.”
“You have. A bit.”
Allyson shakes her head. “No. I think I’d remember.”
“In Paris. In the Latin Quarter.”
Allyson’s mind spins and lands on the carousel of postcards that she had pretended to look at while Willem chatted with some girls he’d known from home. Ana Lucia was one of them?
“But why would she hate me?” Allyson asks, remembering her own jealousy at any girl Willem seemed vaguely interested in. But jealousy was one thing. Ana Lucia had literally thrown Allyson out of her dorm room.
“Because she caught me buying the airplane tickets to find you.”
Airplane tickets? Find me where? Allyson mind scrambles to incorporate this new information. It still doesn’t make sense. Willem had gone to Spain to meet the French girl he’d been cheating on Ana Lucia with. Allyson had suspected it was Céline, even though Céline had told Allyson she had not seen Willem since the day he was with Allyson in Paris. At the time, Allyson had believed her.
And just like that, Allyson understands it. How jealousy contorts things. She thinks of Céline, how jealous she had been of her, and how wrong about her. She was Ana Lucia’s Céline.