Instead, she pulled out her phone and googled N.R. Strickland on a whim, as she did occasionally, hoping to read news of a sequel, but ultimately expecting to find nothing. The search engine loaded and . . . wait, N.R. Strickland had a website now.
Shocked, Lily clicked on the link and his bare-bones website appeared. It didn’t provide any information that she didn’t already know from the bio on the back of his book. But what the website did have was a contact form. Amazing. Lily wiped the sweat from her forehead and grinned at her phone. Giddy and increasingly delirious, she typed out a message to N.R. Strickland, telling him just how much his book meant to her, how finding his story had changed the trajectory of her life.
Her heartbeat increased, and her palms grew clammier, but she chalked it up to her excitement. Even when her breaths turned shallow and black spots aggressively clouded her vision, she continued to type. It wasn’t until her phone slipped out of her hand and the train seemed to tilt off-kilter that Lily realized she was falling. Fainting, to be more accurate.
“Oh my God!” the blonde shouted as Lily hit the floor, clutching her copy of The Elves of Ceradon.
Minutes later, after Lily came to, and kind strangers helped her up, and someone offered her a bottle of water, and a mom forced her to eat a pack of her child’s fruit snacks, Lily was busy focusing on the fact that she’d just fainted. Her mind was so far from the email she’d feverishly drafted, unaware that it had been sent prematurely and was already on its way through cyberspace for its intended recipient.
Over three thousand miles away in the city of Amsterdam, Nick Brown was trying his best not to embarrass himself and cry in a room full of people who’d been strangers to him only a month ago. But he couldn’t help it. He was touched that they’d thrown him a goodbye party. And he felt slightly self-conscious to have so much attention on him.
“Remember us fondly, Nick,” Jakob Davids said, raising his glass, his lips spread in a genuine smile. “We look forward to reading the article once it publishes. Proost!”
“Proost!” the rest of the Davids family shouted, clinking their glasses.
“Proost!” Nick said quietly, lifting his glass as well, although it was filled with only water.
Rubbing the back of his neck, feeling both grateful for the goodbye dinner but also that he wasn’t worth the trouble, Nick looked around at the Davids family and tried to commit them to memory. He’d spent the last few weeks with them. They were an Afro-Dutch family who owned a Surinamese cuisine restaurant, and he’d been writing a piece about them and their business for his column with World Traveler. There was Jakob and his wife, Ada, who, at thirty, were only three years older than Nick, their young children, Jolijn and Christophe, and Jakob’s mother, Ruth, who’d migrated from Suriname, South America, to Amsterdam in her early twenties. They lived in a small town house a few blocks away from Sarphatipark.
Nick’s job made it so that he was constantly on the go. It was what he liked most about it. His life was a revolving door of faces and places. But something about the Davidses had latched on to him. Maybe it was because they were a close-knit family who actually enjoyed spending time together, something Nick had always craved. He didn’t want to leave the Davidses and wished he could soak in their togetherness for a little while longer. But he was off to Munich in the morning for his next assignment. He’d have to leave the Davidses behind.
And that was probably for the best anyway. The past few weeks had been nice. But almost too nice. It was making Nick anxious. He found that he was constantly waiting for the inevitable dropping of the other shoe.
“Thank you for all of this,” Nick said to the Davidses. “I’m grateful that you allowed me into your home and your lives.” He took a deep breath, fighting off the strong wave of surprising emotions. “I’m really going to miss you.”
“We’ll miss you too. You’re basically family now!” Jakob barked out a laugh, unaware of the effect that his words had on Nick. He clapped his hand onto Christophe’s shoulder. “Isn’t he, son?”
Christophe grinned and nodded.
Nick felt a little twinge in his stomach, watching that small interaction between father and son. He shook it off and smiled at the Davidses, feeling slightly relieved when Ada began to play some music and beckoned Jakob to dance with her in the middle of the living room. Ruth, who was awake way past her normal bedtime, sat down on the couch and promptly fell asleep.
Then Christophe and Jolijn, the nine-year-old twins, suddenly appeared in front of Nick with a mischievous twinkle in their eyes.