Page 19 of The Expat Affair

The woman from the park stares at me with a bold, almost aggressive gaze, looking every bit the Prins. Fur-trimmed coat, knee-high suede boots, red soles peeking out from skyscraper heels. It’s such a different look than the first time I saw her, barefaced and hair blowing all around, her puffy coat streaked with dog hair and mud. It took me a minute to make the connection.

She comes at me across the pavement, holding out a hand. “It’s beyond time we made the official introductions, don’t you think? I’m Willow Prins. Sorry I didn’t introduce myself the first time.”

My gaze dips to her outstretched hand, the smattering of diamonds sitting on multiple fingers. When I don’t reach for it, she tucks it in the pocket of her coat.

“So why didn’t you?” I ask.

She gives me a smile, one that’s at the same time warm and self-deprecating. “Because what was I going to say? Hey, you’re the girl who found my husband’s business partner dead on the floor. Want to grab a coffee sometime?”

She tucks a lock of hair behind a delicate ear, a gesture that makes her seem nervous. “That would’ve been weird.”

“As if this isn’t.”

Willow laughs like I’m joking, which I’m decidedly not. It’s beyond weird, standing here, outside of Xander’s funeral, talking to this woman who knows who I am. My tragic connection to her family. She knew it when she sidled up to the bench I was stretching against to ask if I’d seen her dog’s ball, and she knows it now.

“Did you follow me to the park?”

Her eyes go wide at the suggestion, and she gives a firm shake of her head. “No. I swear. You can ask Sem. My son. He and I go there all the time with Ollie, the dog you saw. He’ll tell you that grass field is our spot.”

She pauses, gazing up the street her family just drove down when they left her here in a cloud of exhaust. “But when I spoke to you, I did know who you were. I mean, obviously. Xander was an associate of the House and a friend. I recognized you from the pictures online. I’ve been following this story from the beginning.”

Her and everybody else on the planet. Last time I looked, that picture was still everywhere, and now there are plenty of others floating around the internet, as well. Me, pushing through the reporters outside my door, hustling down the street as they shout my name, ducking into stores and behind buildings. I’m not all that great at math, but with dozens of pictures and clips of me floating around every social media site in a country of only seventeen million, the odds are good the killer has seen me, too.

“Those people you were with,”

I say, “the ones who just drove off in the fancy cars . . .”

Willow glances down the empty road, then turns back with a nod. “My husband, Thomas. His parents and sister. Her family.”

Pretty, privileged people, born and bred Prinses who, despite this woman’s designer clothes, don’t fit her somehow. The way they bustled around the parking lot, all that urgency and self-importance, the way her husband kissed her, with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides, before he raced off and left her alone. Her face as she watched him drive off, with such obvious hurt and longing. I barely know this woman, but I saw it, and yet her own husband can’t.

“They seem like real gems.”

Willow snorts, her dark hair moving like liquid over her shoulders. “That’s one way to put it. They certainly think of themselves as the diamonds they’re so proud of peddling.”

“They left you here.”

Willow doesn’t seem all that torn up about it. She shrugs, the fur of her collar tickling her earlobes. “Diamond business. I’m used to it, unfortunately.”

A sudden and icy wind blows across the lot, stirring up leaves and tugging at our hair and clothes, and Willow points to dark clouds gathering above the field. Typical Dutch weather, and why no matter the temperature, the terraces fill up the second the sun shines because heaven forbid you miss a single ray.

“I’m headed to the train station. You?”

For a second or two, I consider denying it. The station is a good fifteen-minute walk plus another twenty on the train, and I’m not sure I want to commit to that much time in this woman’s company.

But those storm clouds . . . My coat has a hood, but I didn’t think to bring an umbrella—always a mistake in a country with weather as fickle as this one. I’d really love to make it to the station before the sky starts dumping rain.

In the end, I just shrug. “Lead the way.”

It takes her a second or two to tap in the coordinates on Google Maps, then she points us away from the sheep and back toward town.

“Listen,”

she says once the two of us have fallen into stride, “I’m in a weird position here. Not that any of this is about me, of course. It’s about you and Xander and the tragedy you witnessed—”

“I didn’t witness anything.”

“You didn’t see the killer? You can’t identify him at all?”

“No. I slept through the whole thing.”

“Still. You were there, in his penthouse when Xander was killed, which means no matter how innocent you may be of any wrongdoing, you were involved. Sorry to say it, but that makes you a target.”

I pause to let a dusty Fiat pass by before we cross the otherwise empty street. Two-story row homes rise up on both sides, ugly yellow brick facades with lace-covered windows and overplanted front yards the size of a postage stamp. Such a far cry from the majestic buildings that line Amsterdam’s canals, it feels like we’re in a different country.

“The detective told me much the same, but I don’t have the necklace and neither does he. It’s missing, along with whatever else was in Xander’s safe. I’m kind of assuming the killer has it.”

“Even if that’s true, what about all the other people who’ve seen that picture of you wearing a necklace worth half a million euros? And by now, let me tell you, plenty have. Do you know what they’re thinking? I’ll tell you what they’re thinking, that you might be an easy way to score some diamonds.”

“But I don’t have any.”

“That’s actually worse.”

She shoots me an apologetic wince. “Sorry, but it’s true. At least with diamonds in your back pocket, you’d have some leverage. Something to barter for your life.”

A coiling sense of dread throbs in the pit of my stomach. All this time I’ve been so focused on proclaiming my innocence—I didn’t hurt Xander, I didn’t steal his diamonds—that I haven’t allowed myself to think very hard about the implications. Say someone confronts me. Say they hold a knife to my throat or a gun to my head, then what? Willow is right. They’re not going to believe I didn’t swipe a diamond or two just because I say so. I would be better off with diamonds to use as leverage.

A sentiment very similar to the one in that note. I hope for your sake you have the necklace.

I stop dead in the center of a two-lane street. A bike zooms by, a mother with a kid of around seven or eight standing on the back rack, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. By now, I’m used to all the precarious ways people ride their bikes in this country—without helmets and at top speeds—but a kid balancing on the back of one like he’s some kind of tightrope walker is a new one for me.

But it must not be for Willow, because she doesn’t so much as bat an eye. She just waits for it to pass, then steps onto the sidewalk on the other side.

“You wrote the note, didn’t you?”

Willow turns around, frowning at me across the bike lane. “What note?”

Her expression is practically theatric.

“The note, Willow. Oh my God, you were following me. It’s how you knew my running route, which house I lived in, which mail slot to drop that note into. Because you’ve been following me around town.”

“Get out of the street, .”

Up at the light, a car slides into the intersection, then rolls to a stop. The driver taps his horn, three staccato beeps in quick succession. My feet stay planted to the pavement.

“What about the tracker? Was that yours, too? And the break-in?”

Her eyes go wide. “Someone broke in to your house? When?”

“Tell me.”

The car honks again, longer this time, and she hustles into the street, grabs me by the wrist, and drags me to the curb.

“No, . I didn’t track you. I didn’t have to. But I did leave you that note.”

I wrench my arm out of her grip. “How did you find me?”

“Have you Googled yourself lately? Or done an image search on the picture that’s currently breaking the Dutch internet? Because you may have locked your socials down, but there are still plenty of screenshots of you, flitting around the streets of Amsterdam. Anybody who knows anything about this city can point to the exact spot on the map where they were taken, and anybody who doesn’t can check the geotag. Ever heard of it? Geotags have metadata that’s specific to locations, a geographic—”

“I know what a geotag is.”

The sky starts spitting water, fat, freezing raindrops that splatter the pavement, the parked cars, our clothes, and skin. The wind is picking up, too. I know what those frigid gusts mean, and so does Willow. She checks the map, then gestures for me to follow her further up the street.

“The point is, I found you in like five minutes flat.”

“And the park?”

Her gaze flits away for a second or two, then lands dead on mine. “Okay, fine. I may have planted myself in your path, but I swear to you—I swear—it’s only because I wanted to see you face-to-face. To look you in the eye and see if all those things people are saying about you online are true.”

“And?”

“And I think you’re telling the truth. I do. I think you are an innocent bystander in another man’s tragedy, but you should know that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Xander’s killer is still out there. If he didn’t already know you were asleep in Xander’s bed when he came through there, he does now. And I’m pretty sure he knows where you live.”

An icy shiver dances down my spine. I think about the break-in, and Willow is right. I’ve made myself far too easy to find.

Still.

“Why, though?”

I ask. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. Why do you care?”

“Because Xander worked for my husband. He was a friend.”

She pauses to frown. “Was he a friend? I don’t know. He was self-absorbed and cared way too much about what other people thought of him, and his behavior rode the knife edge of what is socially and morally acceptable. We bickered like siblings. He drove me up an absolute tree. But he was also exceptionally kind.”

A sudden sadness pings me in the center of the chest. “So kind. When we were texting, I mentioned in passing that I’d murder for some Nerds Gummy Clusters, and he brought a pack on the date. He got them at that store on the Leidsestraat. He hadn’t even met me yet and he went to all that trouble.”

Willow looks over with a smile. “That sounds exactly like something he’d do. Last year, he sent me flowers on Mother’s Day after I told him I don’t have the best relationship with mine. He learned sign language so he could crack jokes with my son. As annoying as his behavior could be, he made up for it in a million little ways. I’m going to miss the guy.”

I nod. “Me, too.”

“So anyway, after I spoke to you in the park, my curiosity morphed into concern. I wanted to make sure you understood the danger you were in. I’d hate for what happened to Xander to happen to you, too.”

We walk in silence for a bit while I try to process all this. Try to process Willow tracking me down, following me around town, leaving me notes of warning simply because she was concerned for a stranger’s safety. If it were the other way around, would I have done the same thing? Would I have worried for her?

Maybe. It’s possible.

Because suddenly I’m thinking about the time I trailed two Americans around the Albert Heijn simply because hearing their chatter felt like home. Or when I introduced myself to some random lady on the street simply because she was holding a copy of USA Today. Maybe I’m lonely in my new expat life, but there’s a spark of truth in Willow’s words. There’s something about meeting a fellow American so far from home that conjures an instant and automatic connection.

“Lemme ask you this,”

I say as a raindrop smacks me in the forehead. I flip up my hood and wipe it away with a sleeve. “If you were me, what would you do?”

“Hire security. But assuming you can’t afford that . . .”

She pauses, looking over just long enough for me to shake my head. “I don’t know. Be really, really careful, I guess.”

Her words echo Detective Boomsma’s parting shot: Two people are dead, and I’d really prefer you not be the third. I think of the man in the ball cap and beanie who’s found me twice now, and helplessness presses down on me like a hot, lead blanket.

Suddenly, the skies open up, dropping icy rain on our heads in a solid, soaking sheet. Willow squeals and takes off for the first shelter she sees, a café across the street with an awning just big enough to cover a sliver of sidewalk. I race behind, dodging the puddles and bikes and parked cars.

We press ourselves to the building for a second or two, shivering and watching the downpour, then Willow points a finger at the door. “Drink?”

“God, yes.”