“A lot has happened to me too,” she tells Willem.
• • •
They tell the story in bits, in tandem. The parts already known: Willem being concussed. The parts guessed: Willem being beaten by the skinheads; Allyson fleeing back to London in misery. They share the frustration of never finding out each other’s true names, their whole names, email addresses. They remedy that. (Willem Shiloh De Ruiter. Allyson Leigh Healey, etc. etc.) Allyson tells Willem about the letter she wrote him last March, when she finally allowed herself to wonder if maybe the worst hadn’t happened, if maybe Willem hadn’t abandoned her.
Willem tells Allyson about only just finding out about the letter’s existence last month, trying to track it down, and only yesterday finding out what it said.
“How is that possible?” Allyson asks. “I got the letter back four days ago.”
“You got it back?” Willem asks. “How?”
“When I went to your house. Your old house, in Utrecht.”
Broodje’s place, on Bloemstraat, where he’d spent the dark days following his return from Paris, healing from the beating, from everything, really.
“How did you know to go there?” he asks. “To Bloemstraat.” He hadn’t lived there when they’d met, and he hadn’t given her any contact information. This was something he had regretted.
Allyson is embarrassed now, at the lengths she went through to find him. She doesn’t regret going through them, but she understands how overzealous it might look. In her discomfort, she starts to pull her feet away. But Willem won’t let her. He holds them fast. And this small gesture gives her the courage to tell him. About venturing to Paris. About tracking down Céline. About going to the Hôpital Saint-Louis. About Dr. Robinet and his kindness. The address, which led her back to the house in Utrecht. And to the letter.
“I kept the letter. I actually have it in my backpack.”
She leans over and pulls out a creased envelope. She hands it to Willem. There are generations of addresses here. Tor’s house in Leeds, the original Guerilla Will headquarters (how had she found that?), forwarded to Willem’s former houseboat in Amsterdam, since sold, and forwarded on to Bloemstraat.
“You can read it if you want,” Allyson offers.
“Seems beyond the point,” Willem says. Though that isn’t why he doesn’t want to read it. Tor had instructed someone to email him and tell him what the letter said. He doesn’t have the stomach to read the whole letter in front of Allyson.
But Allyson takes the envelope back, unfolds the letter inside of it, and hands it to him.
Dear Willem:
I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.
I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.
The letter is not what he thought it would be. Not what Tor suggested it was. It takes Willem a moment to find his voice again, and when he does, he speaks to the Allyson who wrote the letter as much as to the girl sitting here. “I didn’t just leave,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t forget. And I wasn’t okay.”
“I know that now,” she says. “I think part of me knew it then, too but I wasn’t brave enough to believe it. I was okay that day but I wasn’t okay generally. I am now.”