13 Little Blue Envelopes(50)

“I won’t.”

After her sudden confession, Olivia lapsed right back into being Olivia, with her middle-distance stare and the constant rubbing of her legs.

“I think they’re buying cheese,” she said after a moment, and got up and went across the bridge.

Ginny sat perfectly still for a moment and watched the

boats rocking in the canal. The amazing part wasn’t exactly that Olivia was gay—it was that Olivia had feelings and things to say and that she’d said them. There was something under that emo-tionless gaze of hers.

Olivia had just hit on something as well . . . not the thing about the cheese, but about not noticing what’s right in front of you. Like Piet—he saw The Night Watch every day and never really looked at it. What was in front of her? Boats. Some water. Some old canal buildings. Her oversized bicycle that she was going to have to ride all the way back to Amsterdam, probably getting herself killed in the process.

What was she doing? There was no hidden message here.

Aunt Peg had screwed this one up. There was no Charlie.

Piet was clueless. And now she was reduced to trying to

string together some kind of theory about what this was all 226

about—a theory based on nothing but snippets of conversation.

Amsterdam, she had to admit to herself, was just a washout.

For their final night in town, the Knapps had decided to go to a restaurant that was in a medieval bank that looked like a tiny castle. There were torches on the stone walls and suits of armor in the corners. Olivia seemed tapped out from her confession earlier in the day and stared at one of these for the entire meal, never once speaking.

“So,” Mrs. Knapp said, producing a sheet of paper, which she set on the table. “I’ve written up a little list for you, Ginny. We’ll say twenty euros for tonight’s dinner, just to make things easy.”

She wrote something on the bottom and then passed the

paper to Ginny. All along, the Knapps had been dropping their credit card for everything. Ginny had been aware that she was going to have to contribute at some point. That point had obviously come in the form of this very carefully itemized list of every ticket and every meal, plus the cost of her part of the hotel.

Ginny certainly didn’t mind paying for herself, but there was something odd about having the bill passed to her in the middle of dinner, with all four Knapps looking on. She felt too self-conscious to even look at it. She put in on her lap and pulled the edge of the tablecloth over it.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll need to go to the ATM, though.”

“Take your time!” Mr. Knapp said. “In the morning.”

So why, Ginny wondered, did you give it to me now?

Back at the Huis, Ginny read over the list and realized that she hadn’t been paying any attention at all to how much this was 227

costing. They didn’t ask for the full amount for the room (it turned out that they had the nicest rooms in the place, which cost a lot more), but it still came to two hundred euros for the five days. Along with the frightening pace of their sightseeing (all of those admissions added up), the restaurants, the Internet café—she had burned through almost five hundred euros. She was fairly sure that she had five hundred euros left, but the sliver of doubt gave her a sleepless night. She was up before anyone, and she slipped out to make sure.

The ATM gave her the money, which was a relief, but it

wouldn’t tell her what her balance was. It just spat a handful of purple notes at her, then winked off with a message in Dutch.

It could have said, “Screw you, tourist!” for all she knew.

She sat down on the sidewalk and pulled out the next envelope. Inside, there was a postcard, painted in swirling watercolors. It seemed to be a view of the sky, but there were two suns—one containing a 1 and the other a 0.

Letter ten.

“All right,” she said, “what now?”

228





#10



#10

Dear Ginny,

Let’s not be precious about it, Gin. We haven’t

talked about it so far, and it’s about time we did.

I got sick. I am sick. I will continue to get sicker.

I don’t like it, but that’s the truth—and it’s

always better to face things head-on. Rich words

coming from me, but accurate ones.

When I stopped before going into the Empire State

that November morning—there was a reason. It wasn’t

just because I felt moral indignation at the thought

of working in the building. I had forgotten the

suite number of the office where I was going. I’d

left it at home.

The other version made for a better story . . . that

I stopped dead, turned around, left. That’s romantic.

It’s not quite the same if I said I just had a brain

fart, left my Post-it, and had to turn around.

Looking back, Gin, I think that was the

beginning. It was little things like that. I’ve

always been a little flaky, I admit, but there was

a definite pattern going on. Little facts were just

getting winked away now and then. My doctors tell

me that this problem I have is fairly recent, that

there’s no way I would have seen symptoms two years