Page 2 of The Expat Affair

I’m standing with the other mothers at the edge of the Willemspark School yard, watching the kids play, when I hear the sirens. More than one, a great chorus of swooping sounds, the notes weaving and undulating in the early morning air.

It’s well before the morning bell still, and the playground is packed. Kids, red-cheeked and wet-nosed from the frigid January air, hanging from the monkey bars and climbing up the slide, playing marbles and kicking around a ball. The mothers, clumped together in tight huddles by the bikes or like me, lined up along the brick railing that runs along the sidewalk. The teachers, guarding the double doors in fat coats and sensible shoes. The sirens whoop and shriek, sending a hush over the playground.

Even four-year-old Sem, my sweet, soft-hearted Sem, medically deaf until his cochlear implants at fourteen months, sits stock-still in the flat stretch of metal at the bottom of the slide. I’d sign for him to get out of the way if the little girl at the top weren’t frozen by the sound, too.

Lucy, an adorable blonde in Sem’s class, runs up to her mother, a Brit. “Mama, wat is er?”

Willemspark is a Dutch school, but because of its location in posh Amsterdam Zuid, there are plenty of students here like Lucy and Sem, with one Dutch and one expat parent. Like me, Lucy’s mother has lived here long enough she doesn’t need a translation.

Mama, what’s wrong?

She shakes her head, answering in crisply accented English. “I don’t know, sweetheart. Must be a fire or something.”

It’s not a fire. Lucy’s mom knows it, and so does everyone else. Last month, at a popular lunch spot only a few blocks away, a man was shot in the head while sucking down a plate of spaghetti. These sirens are on that level, and they have kids tipping up their heads, their gazes searching the sky. Last month, the sirens were accompanied by helicopters.

I move through the crowd of tittering mothers on the sidewalk, divided into their usual packs. The English-speakers, pasty-skinned Brits, and big-boned Americans, the occasional Australian or Scot. Other expats, neatly divided by skin color and language. The Dutch mothers, hyperinsular and utterly unapproachable, a competitive band of school volunteers whom the teachers not-so-jokingly call the moedermafia. I don’t really fit in with any of them, but if anyone here knows what those sirens are about, it will be one of the moedermafia.

I sidle up to Brigitte, the loudest of the bunch, a lean, artsy type with round eyes and porcelain skin, bare except for a lipstick so red and shiny it makes me think of blood.

“What happened? Do you know?”

I ask in my best Dutch, which admittedly, isn’t all that great. All the weird vowels, the harsh guttural sounds. Five years in this country, and I still can’t wrap my tongue around the language.

She answers me in English, which somehow always feels like an insult. “They’re going to that condo building on the Valeriusplein. You know, the new building with all the patsers.”

Patsers are show-offs, and if she’s talking about the same building that I’m thinking of, it’s filled with them. Loud, blustery social climbers who live there so they can brag that they own one of the most expensive homes in all of Amsterdam. The cheapest condos in that building went for six million euros a pop, and the penthouse . . .

“Nine million, .”

Xander’s voice sounds through my head. “That’s more than €20 thousand per square meter, the highest square meter price in the country. Just look at all these amenities.”

This was late one evening back in the fall, halfway through a lengthy and detailed tour, and he wasn’t wrong. Xander’s penthouse really is something else. Bought with money he earned conquering the luxury diamond market in Asia, America, and Lord knows where else before my husband, Thomas, lured him back to Holland. This hot-shot gemologist back from abroad, here to drag House of Prins into the twenty-first century.

“Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain it’s that building?”

By now, I’ve switched to English, too. If it’s true what Brigitte says, if those sirens are indeed swirling around Xander’s condo building on the Valeriusplein, I can’t be bothered with the effort of translating my questions to Dutch.

“Julia and I biked by there on the way to school,”

Brigitte says, glancing over with a brusque nod; Julia is her daughter, a six-year- old carbon copy of her mother in more ways than one. “There were all sorts of people standing outside, waiting for the police to get there. More than one of them said the word murder.”

The woman on the other side of her—Manon is her name—sucks in a noisy breath, while, meanwhile, the air in my lungs turns solid.

I turn in the direction of the sirens, my gaze lifting across the canal and toward the building and the park beyond, but it’s too far away, with too many buildings in between. There’s nothing but trees and blue sky.

Still. An ominous feeling seeps through my veins like silty Dutch soil.

“How much you want to bet it was the Rolex gang?”

Manon says to Brigitte in Dutch, ignoring me completely. Manon is a former model with a tongue as sharp as her jawline, and I’ve never been a fan—though I’m fairly certain the feeling is mutual. “There’s so much money in that building. It’s Walhalla for the Rolex gang.”

The Rolex gang, a group of delinquent teenagers roaming the city, trawling the shops and streets for anyone worth mugging, then following them home and robbing them blind. They especially love watches and jewelry.

“Maybe you just misheard. Surely, no one was really murdered,”

I say, even though what I really want to know is who? Who was murdered? Who?

“I know what I heard,”

Brigitte says with a sniff. “They said the word murder more than once.”

On the other side of the playground, the teachers begin clapping, a signal for the kids to line up even though the bell is still a good minute or two away. My gaze tracks to Sem, already bored of the drama, watching a couple of the older boys play soccer with an empty Coke bottle. He’s standing close enough to hear the clapping, but there’s too much ambient noise for it to register.

“But how did they get inside?”

Manon says in her native tongue. “A troop of teenagers can’t sneak past a doorman. Not unless they beat him up, too.”

Even if she doesn’t have all the details right, she’s not wrong about the building’s security. The doorman is indeed a hurdle, as are the locks on every gate and door, as are the security cameras monitoring every entrance and hall and exit. Whoever did this would have had to pull a trick or two to get inside, and they’d need a fob to operate the elevator.

I tug my phone from my pocket, pull up my local news app, and scroll through this morning’s headlines. There’s nothing about a murder. Nothing about any sort of disturbance on the Valeriusplein.

I look up and spot Sem, watching me just outside the door. What’s wrong? he signs.

Nothing, I sign back. I try to smile, but my lips stick to my teeth. Have a good day.

With a reluctant nod, Sem slips into the stream of little bodies shuffling toward the door and disappears inside. I shiver despite my fur-lined coat.

“According to what I heard, the doorman didn’t even know anything was wrong. Not until one of the neighbors reported a pretty woman racing out of there. Apparently, she was frantic.”

A hard knot forms in the pit of my stomach because a pretty woman also tracks. Xander has a constant parade of them going in and out of his penthouse, Amsterdam’s very own version of a fuckboy. The first time I called him that, he laughed so hard he had to sit down. In the months since, it’s become something of an inside joke.

And yet . . .

And yet.

“We have a problem,”

Xander told me only a few days ago. “I think there’s someone following me.”

Thomas was upstairs putting Sem to bed and it was drizzling out, but I still ducked into the backyard with my phone just in case. Xander knew better than to call during family time, but sometime in the past month or so, the rules had been tossed out the window.

“You think or you know?”

I said, keeping an eye on the slice of kitchen I could see through the back door window, empty for now. Deeper into the yard, my rescue Ollie sniffed at his favorite bay laurel bush. Ollie was my excuse if and when Thomas suddenly reappeared.

“I know,”

Xander said that night in my ear. “I’ve seen him twice now. At the café across the street from the factory and just now, on the sidewalk outside my apartment. A tall guy wearing a black baseball cap.”

Which could describe a million men in this country, and was he really sure? Because last week, he’d called to tell me someone rummaged through his desk at the factory. The week before, someone was listening to his calls. I didn’t take it very seriously because Xander is under a lot of stress. Everyone at House of Prins is. A lot is riding on the new lab-grown line, and it still isn’t meeting projections.

Next to me, the moedermafia has grown by three more mothers, all of them still chattering away about the doorman, the woman, the patser dead on the floor. I listen with half an ear, thinking there are almost a million people living in Amsterdam proper. A million other people the moedermafia could be referring to now, in any one of dozens of other buildings backing up to the park. Just because they say it’s the one on the Valeriusplein doesn’t mean it’s true.

“Let’s go see what we can find out,”

Brigitte suggests, waving the other mothers toward the sidewalk and the row of bikes beyond as the last of the children shuffle into the school. “Maybe the neighbors will still be standing outside, or we can try that café on the corner. Somebody must know something.”

Their gazes don’t so much as skim over mine.

My husband is always telling me that I should try harder, that small talk between mothers at the school fence is a beloved Dutch tradition, but Thomas is a Prins, the sixth-generation heir to a diamond dynasty who’s never had to work to make friends. People gravitate to him for his money and status, but that privilege doesn’t automatically extend to me just because we share the same last name. For these women, for the other mothers here at school, I’m not really a Prins, and I never will be.

I stand there for a long moment, alone in a lingering crowd of women making plans for workouts and boozy lunches and book clubs that don’t include me, and for once, I don’t feel like the last kid to get picked for a team I don’t really want to be on anyway. My head is swimming with what I just heard, the news drowning out all the rest.

A pretty woman.

A murdered man.

There are easier ways to get to the truth than asking the moedermafia.

On the short bike ride home, I call Thomas.

He answers, like always, in English, because it’s faster and less awkward than suffering through my clunky Dutch. “I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”

No hello, my love. No how’s your morning going? But at least he takes my call. Thomas always picks up when I call, no matter where he is or what he’s doing. It’s the one positive of having a medically fragile child, I suppose, that your husband never ignores your calls.

“I won’t keep you long. I was just calling to see how your morning is going.”

There’s a long, empty pause, mostly because I never call to see how his morning is going. But I can’t just come out and ask if Xander happens to be sitting at his desk down the hall. I can’t just tell him about the sirens and the moedermafia and ask if the rumors are true without raising Thomas’s suspicions. Voicing my worry would only raise Thomas’s radar in ways I really don’t want to be raising right now.

“Busy,”

he says. “The factory is in complete chaos.”

“But no disasters?”

Thomas laughs. “Not yet, but the day is still early, so let’s not jinx it. Just the normal, end-of-the-week pandemonium.”

“Oh. That’s good, then, I guess. Want me to swing by with lunch?”

It’s what I used to do when Sem was a tiny baby, strap him to my chest and let the tram carry us across town to the Prins factory, a beautifully restored building his family has owned for five generations. This was back when Thomas and I still felt fragile and new, when both of us were still trying very hard to make it work. Maybe he thinks five years is long enough.

“Lunch?”

I laugh. “Yeah, you know, that thing people do where they eat food in the middle of the day? I could pick up sandwiches from that Italian place on the way. Or sushi if you’d prefer.”

I’ll need to make arrangements though; Sem’s school breaks for lunch, which means I’ll need to ask our housekeeper, Martina, to handle pickup.

Another quiet follows, an awkward silence that stretches a couple of beats too long.

“I’d love that, , but today’s . . . not great. I have a meeting with the architect at the new store in a few minutes, followed by back-to-back interviews all afternoon. My father keeps trying to corner me to ask about the agenda for next week’s board meeting, but I haven’t had a second to think about it yet. And my inbox is a jungle.”

It’s such a stark difference from when we first met, when he walked into the Atlanta restaurant where I was waiting tables.

A business dinner, though he told me later they got close to nothing done.

Thomas was too busy coming up with excuses to call me over, chat me up, sweet-talk me into meeting him after I got off work. He was so not my type—too thin, far too bookish in those horn-rimmed glasses—but he was sweet and persistent enough that I relented. Thomas ended the meeting right then and there.

That’s what I remember most about our beginnings, a blur of ditched appointments and called-in sick days, blowing off friends and work and other commitments whenever he was in town, so we could hole up in his suite at the St.

Regis.

Even now, the smell of freshly starched sheets will take me back there, to the sun slanting through the plate glass window onto a carpet littered with room service plates, our bare legs intertwined under seven-hundred-count Egyptian cotton while his cellphone buzzed away on the nightstand.

We burned so hot and heavy in the beginning, and I know long-distance relationships come with a particular ache that dulls when you see each other every day, but still.

When I think back to those early days, the gulf between then and now makes me sad.

“I hear it,”

I say, trying not to let the hurt seep into my tone. “You’re a busy man.”

“Crazy busy. Can we catch up tonight?”

“Sure. Of course. No worries.”

I keep my voice breezy and bright, something that’s getting harder and harder by the day. I try not to think about how long it’s been since we’ve had one of those lunches, or even shared a quiet dinner at home. Last night, it was almost midnight before he slipped in bed, and this morning, I woke to the sound of the front door clicking shut a full two hours before my alarm. Thomas has always been a hard worker, but this doesn’t feel like the schedule of a man busy with work. This feels like the schedule of a man trying very hard to avoid his wife.

In the background, a phone rings, and fingers click on a keyboard. “See you tonight,”

he says, and I hear in his voice that he’s already moved on. His mind is already somewhere else.

“See you tonight. At dinner.”

We hang up, and for a second or two, I consider a drive-by of Xander’s building before I think better of it.

The last thing I need is for someone to see me there, staring up at the penthouse with a horrified look on my face.

I could probably explain it away to the other rubberneckers, but I know how people in this town talk.

Better to monitor the news sites from the privacy of my living room.

I take a left for home, steering my cargo bike down the familiar curves of the Koningslaan, bumping over the pavers along the pond.

For well-to-do mothers in Amsterdam Zuid, bikes like mine aren’t just a way to ferry kids to and from school, they’re a status symbol.

Sleek, electric, and stupidly expensive, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to navigate the city’s winding streets on than a car.

At the fork, I veer left, heading down a pretty street lined on both sides with hundred-year-old villas.

Big imposing buildings of burgundy brick and bright white trim, with deep balconies and flag-topped turrets and rooftops of black slate or terracotta tile.

This is the neighborhood where Amsterdam’s moneyed live, including a few members of the monarchy, which is fitting, since the streets here are named after their ancestors.

Sofia, Hendrik, Emma—the royal gang’s all here.

And the nicest house at the far end of the street, the three-story freestanding villa with big bay windows and a deep backyard that overlooks the water—that one belongs to Thomas.

The house he bought for himself long before he and I met.

Thomas’s home, and one day Sem’s.

I just happen to live there.

One of the trade-offs of marrying into old money is that all this luxury is only on loan.

None of it actually belongs to me.

Not the house with all the artwork and expensive furniture, not the German cars in the driveway or the walk-in closet filled with designer clothes.

Definitely not the diamonds.

More diamonds than I could ever wear, both a perk and a hazard of marrying a Prins.

None of them are mine, not according to the air-tight prenup I signed. The second Thomas and I separate, back they go into the Prins family vault.

“Isn’t it a bit . . . big?”

I said after Thomas slid a six-carat flawless Prins-cut solitaire up my finger.

The Rolex bandits I could handle, but what about everyone else? His overbearing father and younger sister, his mother who tolerates me but just barely.

I knew how a stone this big would mark a person like me: as a social climber, as one of those people the moedermafia was talking about—a patser.

For the most part, Thomas knows about my past—my absent father, my estranged mother, my childhood marked by neglect and freebie hand-me-downs.

He knows that the day after my sixteenth birthday I took off, and that it took my mom three weeks to realize I’d skipped town.

He knows that while I’ve worked hard to reinvent myself into someone who might belong in his life, I wear the clothes and diamonds like flashy, fancy masks, covering up the parts of me I don’t want others to see.

My husband knows a lot about me, but he doesn’t know everything.

That day, though, he brushed off my worries with a smile.

“You’re a Prins now, . Soon you’ll be telling me your diamond is too small.”

But Thomas lives in Prinsland, and the too-small complaint is never going to happen.

That’s what all those mothers at school don’t get.

The women speaking languages I don’t understand, the Americans with their expensive athletic gear, the moedermafia who think I don’t notice the way they catalogue my carats, totaling the numbers up in their head with a look of barely disguised venom.

They don’t get that I would trade it all, every ring and bracelet and necklace hanging from me like tinsel on a Christmas tree, pretty but temporary.

They can’t imagine that I’d happily give them every diamond in the vault for a husband who wants to have lunch with me.