“Oh,” Wren says, her eyes so wide and pale they gleam like pearls. “Oh,” she says to me.

“You wouldn’t be Robert-Jan, by any chance?” I ask.

The Hobbit looks surprised for a second. Then he just grins. “Broodje to my friends.”

“Broodje,” Wolfgang chuckles. He turns to me. “It’s a kind of sandwich.”

“Which Broodje loves to eat,” one of his friends says, patting his belly.

Broodje/Robert-Jan pushes the hand away. “You should come to our party tonight. It’s going to be the party to end all parties. He was fantastic, was he not?”

Wren and I both nod. Broodje/Robert-Jan goes on about how great Willem was and then his friend says something to him in Dutch, something, I think, about Willem.

“What did he say?” I whisper to Wolfgang.

“He said he hasn’t seen him, Orlando, I think, so happy, since, I didn’t hear it all, something about his father.”

Wolfgang takes out a packet of tobacco from a leather pouch and begins to roll a cigarette. Without looking at me, he says in his rumbly voice, “I think the actors come out over there.” He points to the little metal gate on the far side of the stage.

He lights his cigarette. His eyes flash. He points to the gate again.

My body feels like it’s no longer solid matter. It is particle dust. It is pure electricity. It dances me across the theater, toward the side of the stage. There is a crowd of well-wishers awaiting the actors. People holding bouquets of flowers, bottles of champagne. The actress who played Celia comes out to whoops and hugs. Next comes Adam, then Rosalind, who gets a heap of bouquets. My heart starts to thunder. Could I have come this close only to miss him?

But then I hear him. He is, as always, laughing; this time at something the guy who played Jacques said. And then I see his hair, shorter than it was, his eyes, dark and light all at once, his face, a small scar on his cheek, which only makes him more strikingly handsome.

My breath catches in my throat. I’d thought I’d embellished him. But really, if anything, the opposite is true. I’d forgotten how truly beautiful he is. How intrinsically Willem.

Willem. His name forms in my throat.

“Willem!” His name rings out loud and clear.

But it’s not my voice that said it.

I touch my fingers to my throat to be sure.

“Willem!”

I hear the voice again. And then I see the blur of movement. A young woman races out from the crowd. The flowers she is carrying drop to the ground as she hurls herself into his arms. And he takes her in. He lifts her off the ground, holds her tight. His arms clutch into her auburn hair, laughing at whatever it is she’s whispering into his ear. They spin around, a tangle of happiness. Of love.

I stand there rooted, watching this very private public display. Finally, someone comes up to Willem and taps him on the shoulder, and the woman slides to the ground. She picks up the flowers—sunflowers, exactly what I would’ve chosen for him—and dusts them off. Willem slides an easy arm around her and kisses her hand. She snakes her arm around his waist. And I realize then that I wasn’t wrong about the love wafting off him during the performance. I was just wrong about who it was for.

They walk off, so close I can feel the breeze as he passes by. We are so close, but he’s looking at her, so he doesn’t see me at all. They go off, hand in hand, toward a gazebo, away from the fray. I just stand there.

I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. It’s Wolfgang. He looks at me, tilts his head to the side. “Finished?” he asks.

I look back at Willem and the girl. Maybe this is the French girl. Or someone altogether new. They are sitting facing each other, knees touching, talking, holding hands. It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. That’s how it felt when I was with him last year. Maybe if an outsider saw us then, that’s exactly how we would’ve looked. But now I’m the one who’s the outsider. I look at them again. Even from here, I can tell she is someone special to him. Someone he loves.

I wait for the fist of devastation, the collapse of a year’s worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. But when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.

I give one last glance toward Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. “Finished,” I say.

But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I’m just beginning.

Thirty-nine

I wake up to bright blinking sunlight. I squint at the travel alarm. It’s almost noon. In four hours, I’m leaving. Wren has decided to stay on a few more days. There’s a bunch of weird museums she just found out about that she wants to see, one devoted to medieval torture, another to handbags, and Winston has told her that he knows someone who can teach her how to cobble shoes, which might keep her here another week. But I have three days left, and I’ve decided to go to Croatia.

I won’t get there till tonight, and I’ll have to leave first thing Monday morning to make my flight back home. So I’ll have just one full day there. But I now know what can happen it just one day. Absolutely anything.

Wren thinks I’m making a mistake. She didn’t see Willem with the redhead, and she keeps arguing that she could be anyone—his sister, for instance. I don’t tell her that Willem, like me, like Wren herself now, is an only child. All last night, she begged me to go to the party, to see how it played out. “I know where it is. Robert-Jan told me. It’s on, oh, I can’t remember the street name, but he said it means ‘belt’ in Dutch. Number one eighty-nine.”

I’d held up my hand. “Stop! I don’t want to go.”

“But just imagine,” she’d said. “What if you’d never met Willem before, and Broodje invited us to the party, and we went, and you two met there for the first time and fell in love? Maybe that’s what happens.”

It’s a nice theory. And I can’t help but wonder if that would’ve happened. Would we fall in love if we met today? Had I really fallen in love with him in the first place? Or was it just infatuation fueled by mystery?

But I’m also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I’m on wasn’t to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.

_ _ _

I’m getting dressed when Wren opens the door, clutching a paper bag. “Hi, sleepyhead. I made you some breakfast. Or rather Winston did. He said it’s very Dutch.”

I take the bag. “Thanks.” I look Wren, who’s grinning like crazy. “Winston, huh?”

Now she’s blushing. “He just got off work and he’s going to take me for a bike ride and introduce me to his cobbler friend as soon as you leave,” she says, her grin now threatening to split her face. “And tomorrow he says I have to go to an Ajax football game with him.” She pauses to consider. “It wasn’t on my list, but you never know.”

“No, you don’t. Well, I should go soon. Let you get to your, um, cobbling.”

“But your flight’s not for ages yet.”

“That’s okay. I want to leave enough time, and I hear the airport is amazing.”

I pack up the rest of my things and go downstairs with Wren. Winston points me toward the train station.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you to the station or the airport?” Wren asks.

I shake my head. I want to see Wren ride away on the pink bike as if I’ll see her again tomorrow. She hugs me tight and then kisses me three times like the Dutch do. “Tot ziens,” she calls. “It means ‘see you later’ in Dutch, because we aren’t saying good-bye.” I swallow the lump in my throat. And then Winston gets on his big black bike and Wren gets on the little pink bike, and they pedal away.

I hoist my backpack up and make the short walk to the train station. There are trains every fifteen minutes or so to Schiphol, and I buy a ticket and a cup of tea and go sit under the clattering destination board to eat my breakfast. When I see what’s inside, I have to laugh. Because Winston has made me a hagelslag sandwich. For all our talk, I never did get to try this particular delicacy.

I take a bite. The hagelslag crunches, then melts into the butter and still-warm bread. And what’s left over tastes just like him.

All at once, I finally understand what it means for time to be fluid. Because suddenly the entire last year flows before me, condensing and expanding, so that I’m here in Amsterdam eating hagelslag, and at the same time, I’m in Paris, his hand on my hip, and at the same time, I’m on that first train to London, watching the countryside whiz by, and at the same time, I’m in the line for Hamlet. I see Willem. At the canal basin, catching my eye. On the train, his jeans still unstained, me still unstained. On the train to Paris, his thousand shades of laughter.

The destination board shuffles, and I look up at it, and as I do, imagine a different version of time. One in which Willem quits while he’s ahead. One in which he never makes that remark about my breakfast. One in which he just says good-bye on that platform in London instead of inviting me to Paris. Or one in which he never stops to talk to me in Stratford-upon-Avon.

And that’s when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I’m still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he’s in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

Maybe accident isn’t the right word after all. Maybe miracle is.

Or maybe it’s not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.

How can I come this far and not tell him—he, who would understand it best—that by giving me the that flyer, by inviting me to skip Hamlet, he helped me realize that it’s not to be that matters, but how to be?

How can I come this far and not be brave?

“Excuse me,” I say to a woman in a polka-dot dress and cowboy boots. “Is there a street in Amsterdam named after a belt?”

“Ceintuurbaan,” she answers. “Tram line twenty-five. Right outside the station.”

I race out of the train station and jump onto the tram, asking the driver where to get off for Ceintuurbaan number one eighty-nine. “Near Sarphatipark,” he replies. “I’ll show you.”

Twenty minutes later, I get off at the park. Inside, there’s a small playground with a large sandpit, and I go sit down under a tree to summon my bravery. A couple of children are putting the finishing touches on an elaborate sand castle, several feet high, with towers and turrets and moats.

I stand up and make my way to the building. I don’t even know for sure that he lives here, except that the feeling of rightness, it has never been stronger. There are three bells. I ring the bottom one. An intercom squawks with a woman’s voice.

“Hello,” I call. Before I say anything else, the door clicks open.

I walk inside the dark, musty hallway. A door swings open, and my heart skips a beat, but it’s not him. It’s an older woman with a yappy dog at her heels.

“Willem?” I ask her. She points a thumb up and shuts her door.

I climb the steep stairs to the second floor. There are two other flats in the building, so this could be his, or the one upstairs. So I just stand there on the doorstep for a moment, listening for sounds inside. It is quiet, save for the faint strains of music. But my heart is beating fast and strong, like a radar pinging: Yes, yes, yes.

My hand shakes a little bit as I knock, and at first the sound is faint, as if I’m knocking on a hollowed-out log. But then I tighten my grip, and I knock again. I hear his footsteps. I remember the scar on his foot. Was it on the right foot or the left? The footsteps come closer. I feel my heart speed up, in double time to those footsteps.

And then the door swings open, and he’s there.

Willem.

His tall body casts a shadow over me, just like it did that first day, that only other day, really, when we met. His eyes, those dark, dark eyes, hiding a spectrum of hidden things, they widen, and his mouth drops. I hear his gasp of breath, the shock of it all.