Page 4 of The Expat Affair

In the end, I have not one lunch date but two.

Sem and his best friend, Vlinder, a stunning Dutch girl with blue eyes and blond ringlets.

They sit shoulder to shoulder in the front cubby of my cargo bike, deep in conversation about Juf Addie, their teacher who’s getting married in May.

Apparently, she’s invited the entire class.

At the end of the driveway, Sem twists around, his fingers tugging at the seat belt.

“Mama, help.”

Two little words, but they never fail to stir up a storm in my chest.

Partly at the lack of mother I have in my own life, but mostly because I am one.

Despite all the warnings doctors gave when I was pregnant.

Despite all the close calls and hospital stays.

Those other mothers at school, they love to complain about how motherhood is so hard.

The endless chores, the lack of time for yourself, the constant onslaught of motherly guilt for doing too much or not enough or making some mistake that can mess your kid up forever.

But for me, the hardest part has always been the worry.

Sem, the child that almost wasn’t.

An accidental pregnancy in every way—only eight months into our long-distance relationship and while I was on the pill.

Too soon, too unplanned, a pregnancy so precarious it felt doomed from day one.

And yet from the day those two lines appeared on the test, there was nothing I wanted more.

I lean in and help him unclip the buckle to his seat belt, then drop a kiss on top of his head.

His hair is the only place on him that’s warm, the dark strands soaking up the January sun, and that familiar cloud settles over me like a lead blanket.

Already this has been a rough winter, filled with one long, chronic cold that’s morphed into croup and spiked his fever so high it sent us to the hospital three times.

He requires constant monitoring and a whole host of specialists we have on speed dial.

For a medically complex kid like Sem, every bug that blows through town, every bacterium that sneaks onto every surface is a danger.

But scariest of all are the ear infections—what might be mild for most kids could be deadly for Sem.

Too close to his cochlear implants, too dangerously close to his brain, which could mean yet another operation to place ventilation tubes, explantation of his cochlear implants, meningitis, death.

Every hurdle we make it past feels like a miracle.

I press the back of my fingers to his forehead.

As usual, he bats my hand away.

“Okay, my love. You’re free. Now help Vlinder.”

As soon as she’s loose, the two of them clamber over the sides and race on skinny legs to the side door, eight centimeters of solid, fortified wood too thick for even the Nazis to bust through once upon a time.

According to Thomas, they came through the front room’s stained glass windows instead, now a sheet of bulletproof glass.

This is the cost of being a Prins, we live in a freaking bunker.

Inside the house, Vlinder and Sem shrug off their coats, dropping their backpacks like sacks of cement to the well-worn marble floor.

They take off down the hall as Ollie comes racing the other way, his tail and tongue wagging in his hurry to get to me, even though it’s only been fifteen minutes since the last time I saw him.

I scratch him behind a scruffy ear. “I know, I know. I missed you, too.”

I dump my keys in the bowl on the hallway table, patting down my windblown hair in the mirror, an eighteenth-century masterpiece of smoky glass and gilded wood and plaster, with an ornate frame of swirling ivy and flowers and shells.

Of all the fabulous pieces in this house, the imported furniture and the artwork decorating the walls, the silverware and the chinaware and the safe full of jewelry upstairs, this mirror is by far my favorite—

a Christmas gift from Thomas’s father from a restoration shop in the city center.

He bought two more just like it, one for himself and the other for Thomas’s sister, Fleur.

“I hope you don’t mind, Martina,”

I say, coming into the kitchen where she stands at the counter, slicing wild radishes for garnish.

I snag one and drag it through a plate of softened, salty butter.

“We have an extra mouth to feed for lunch.

I hear she’s hungry.”

Vlinder and Sem give each other matching smiles.

They’re an island unto themselves, those two, like Thomas and I once were.

Twin flames, I used to call them.

Soulmates. Now the only thing I can think is Just wait. Give it enough time, and she’ll lose interest in you, too.

Martina is my mother’s age, somewhere in her early sixties, but that’s where the similarities stop.

Where my own mother is bleached blonde and perpetually bronzed from the tanning salon, Martina’s look is au naturel.

She’s also scrupulously loyal to Thomas and thus to me, and she loves on Sem like he’s her grandson—a welcome bond since I haven’t spoken to my mother since I was sixteen.

“I hope so,”

Martina says.

“We certainly have plenty.”

I eye the platter Martina has prepared, piled high with every meat imaginable.

Juicy slices of roast beef and fat sausages and multiple kinds of salt-cured hams, more food than three people can eat in a week.

Which in the Prinses’ world, is also the point.

Do you want roast beef? We’ve got four kinds. Paté? Which do you prefer: duck or goose? For families like the one I married into, it’s not about the excess but about options. Getting exactly what you want when you want it is the ultimate privilege.

She tips her knife at the sink, an order for the kids to wash their hands, and they obey because this is her kitchen.

Martina is cook, maid, grocery shopper, dog walker, organizer of repairmen and gardeners, occasional babysitter, and overall master of this domain. Thomas, Sem, and I only live here.

“I hope you didn’t get stuck in all the commotion near the park.”

Martina’s gaze flits meaningfully to the kids, but they’re oblivious, chattering away at the sink.

I shake my head, reach for another radish. “No, but I heard all the sirens. They were a hot topic this morning during drop-off.”

“Someone was—”

Martina swipes a finger across her throat while making a clicking noise with her tongue.

“That’s what I heard, too. Do you know any details?”

I certainly don’t. I spent most of the morning hitting Refresh on the various news apps, but there wasn’t much. Just a one-sentence bulletin in Het Parool, Amsterdam’s main newspaper. Man (44) dood gevonden in eigen woning. Forty-four-year-old man found dead in own home. No mention of what part of town he lived in, or how the man died, or that he may or may not have been murdered. Only that he’s dead.

Martina, however, might. She grew up in a tiny town in the south of Holland, but she’s lived in Amsterdam for ages, and she’s worked for Thomas’s family almost as long. She knows everybody in this part of town. There’s a good chance she knows more than what they’ve reported on the news.

“I ran into Dirk at the market this morning, you know, the Akkermans’ chef, and he told me the man was strangled. In the shower, apparently.”

She pulls a jug from the fridge and moves to the other side of the island, waving a hand in Sem’s line of sight until he looks up. “Jongens, wie wil d’r een kopje melk?”

Guys, who wants a cup of milk? It’s a rhetorical question, as Martina is already pouring.

Strangled, though, and in the shower. I shudder as the image comes to me, a dead and naked Xander sprawled on all that expensive marble.

And the pretty woman—where was she when this happened? Sitting on his chest with her hands around his neck? Hiding in a closet or under a bed? I try to picture it, but the image won’t form. The woman is a mystery.

I get the kids settled at the table, then pluck my iPad from the charger. “Martina, I need to answer a couple of emails. Do you mind keeping an eye on the kids?”

If it were Thomas or his parents, they’d phrase it differently. Keep an eye on the kids, would you, Martina, while I tend to my email. Polite, but still technically an order. Thomas grew up with a whole team of Martinas, hired hands to do the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry and the yard work, who cater to his every whim. He’s used to doling out demands for things he’s perfectly capable of doing himself, while I spent most of my adult life like Martina, on the receiving end.

She wipes her hands on her frilly apron and shoos me toward the door. “Of course, of course. You go. I’ll handle things here.”

Ollie trails me into the solarium, a sunny room that juts into a deep backyard.

I dig my cell from my pants pocket and toss it onto the couch, then sink onto the cushion beside it.

Het Parool has added a few more details under the headline I spotted earlier, only a couple of paragraphs, but they push the boundaries of my Dutch vocabulary just the same.

The man was found this morning in his luxury apartment in Amsterdam Zuid by a female guest, the same woman who police carted in for questioning.

The piece summons up more questions than it gives answers.

I’m about to back out of it when I spot a graphic at the bottom, one with the paper’s headline in tweet form. And underneath, two little words: 47 Replies. I click it and the screen flips me to X.

The comments are all in Dutch, and most of them seem like what I overheard from the moedermafia—light on facts and heavy on conjecture. I’m almost to the bottom when one little word stops my scrolling.

@j_sperd__rcks47 I hear the dead guy worked in diamonds. The killer hit the jackpot. A killer and a diamond thief.

Diamonds. The dead guy worked in diamonds. He lived in the building on the Valeriusplein. There was a pretty woman. It’s too much. The connections churn like acid in my stomach.

Now that the news is out there, I scramble for my phone and fire off a text to Thomas. Maybe a weird question, but is Xander at work? I just heard some concerning news.

The message lands as delivered, but not read.

I picture Thomas in his sleek office overlooking the factory floor, typing away at his laptop.

I see his look of confusion as police officers march across the catwalk to deliver the news, the cutters down on the floor putting down their tools in confusion, in distress.

A House of Prins executive murdered in his own home.

It’s a shock that will shut down the factory for days.

“Sem wanted to show Vlinder his new train set,”

Martina says, coming into the room with a glass and a plate, “so I let them go upstairs. I hope that’s okay.”

She slides my lunch onto a side table, two slices of seedy brown bread topped with a generous layer of ricotta and prosciutto, and a glass of fizzy water, doing a double take at the look on my face. “What? What happened? What’s the matter?”

I shake my head, pointing at my screen. “I just . . . I don’t know if it’s true, but this person on X is calling the murderer a diamond thief.”

Martina tuts, shaking her head with a frown. “Not the Rolex gang again.”

“No, listen.”

I read the post out loud, my tongue twisting around the Dutch. “The dead guy worked in diamonds, Martina. This makes it sound like his death was a robbery gone wrong.”

“You think it was someone you know.”

Not a question. A statement.

I nod. “One of the mothers at school said this happened in that new building on the Valeriusplein. Apparently, there were all sorts of people standing around outside, tons of police cars. You know who lives there, right? Xander owns the penthouse.”

The gleaming apartment plopped onto the building like the fancy top layer of a cake. An architectural masterpiece of steel and stone and sliding glass, surrounded on all sides by a lush terrace.

“Did you talk to Thomas?”

Martina says, the blood draining from her ruddy cheeks. “Thomas will know.”

I tap my phone to awaken the screen, but the text status hasn’t changed. Thomas still hasn’t read my text, which is not a good sign. I flip to his contact card and hit Call, but his cell doesn’t even ring. It kicks me straight to voicemail.

“Voicemail,”

I say, and my stomach twists. The voicemail is another tick in the Xander column. It means Thomas is busy, and with something pressing. He always answers my calls. The thought sits like a hot ember, sizzling in my stomach.

“I’ll go make some calls. See what I can find out. I’m sure it’s nothing, but . . .”

Martina doesn’t finish, just pats me on the shoulder and hustles back to the kitchen.

I scroll a bit, but there’s nothing more.

Only the most basic of facts amplified with rumor and conjecture.

I toss my iPad to the couch cushion and listen to Martina loading the dishes into the dishwasher, waiting until she’s good and busy.

And then I push off the couch and step to the built-ins by the window.

There, on the bottom shelf, at the bottom of an old, dusty box shoved to the very back, is a phone.

One that no one knows about because nobody digs through this box but me, filled with a messy jumble of toys Sem outgrew ages ago, rattles and wobble balls and loud, flashy, torture devices Thomas was constantly pulling the batteries out of because the noise drove him to madness.

I push them aside and my fingers connect with the used Samsung I bought at the market with cash.

Before today, I’ve only used it twice.

With one ear on Martina banging around the kitchen, I power the burner up—still at 49%, thank God—and navigate to the messaging app, which is empty.

Nothing. Not a single peep.

I don’t know if it’s good news or bad.

My heart gives a kick at sudden movement in my periphery, and I slide the phone into my pocket and sink onto the couch.

Sem and Vlinder watch from the doorway, already bundled in their winter coats.

She’s such a pretty little girl, all big eyes and flouncy sleeves.

Her name is the Dutch word for butterfly, and I kind of see the resemblance.

Sem’s fingers close around hers.

“Vlinder wants to play outside.”

“Okay, but you know the rules. Stay in the yard, and don’t go near the water.”

I sign it, too, just to be sure.

In unison, they give a solemn nod and turn, hand in hand, for the back door. I sit for another long moment, giving my heart time to settle while I watch them kick a ball around the grass.

What’s next? An investigation, for sure.

An army of police marching through the factory and the neighborhood and the house, gathering evidence, questioning witnesses.

A media frenzy, reporters and cameras everywhere, a perverse sort of entertainment that will fall back on the already struggling House of Prins.

I tell myself to stop catastrophizing. We don’t know who the dead man is yet. Now is not the time to panic.

My mind drags back to a night this past November, that first, fateful step down a road filled with burner phones and this slow, steady drip of dread.

Surely this isn’t what I think it is.

Surely it’s not Xander but another man murdered on his shower floor.

One big, weird coincidence he and I can laugh about later. Much, much, much later.

My phone buzzes—not the one buried in the couch but my regular cellphone.

I pick it up off the table.

Diamond exec Xander van der Vos murdered in Amsterdam Zuid.

Millions of euros worth of diamonds missing.

Now.

Now is the time to panic.