There is no possible way for me to respond to such kindness. “Be careful,” I say. “Be safe.”
“Give me your key,” he says, and then once he has it: “Wait here. Don’t leave.”
“I won’t,” I say.
I wait a long time.
Tuesday
I wake up, and I’m not on Ollie’s sofa, which is the last place I remember sitting. Instead, I’m in a bed, and sun is streaming in through the windows, and Ollie sits across the room in an armchair. I jolt upright. I don’t recall falling asleep, and I hate my body for letting it happen. I must have shut down, from worry, sadness, and exhaustion, while Ollie was stealing back into the night.
“Ollie,” I whisper. My throat burns from all the crying last night.
“Good morning.”
“What happened? Where’s Willem?”
My panic clears when Willem appears in the doorway.
“I’m here; I’m safe.”
Safe. No more deaths last night except for Mirjam. She’s not safe and never will be. “Did you get—” I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Did you manage to get Mirjam off the bridge?
“It’s done,” Ollie says. “It wasn’t easy. But it’s done.”
“She’s at Mr. Kreuk’s?”
“Yes. And Mrs. de Vries knows what happened. And all the Nazis know, we think, is that two girls tried to run, and they shot one and caught the other.”
I look around at the room I’m lying in, with two bureaus, one of which has a picture of Ollie’s parents. “You gave me your bed.”
“Willem carried you in,” Ollie says. “We slept on the floor.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you had to get Mirjam. I’m sorry for not running when I should have. I’m—” There’s so much more I should apologize for: my thoughtlessness, the way I lost my mind and tried to drag everyone with me.
“We got the camera. At least,” Willem says, too kindly.
“What are you going to do with it? Give it back to Mina or destroy the film?”
They look at each other. “We haven’t decided,” Ollie says. He hands me a mug that had been sitting on his armrest. “Drink.” I lift the cup by rote, but when the liquid slides down my throat, it doesn’t even register to me what it is. In the past twelve hours, I’ve felt everything I could possibly feel. Now I’m numb.
“I should go.” I’m wearing my clothes from last night, though someone has removed my shoes. I’m wrinkled and soiled. There’s a run in my stockings, my last pair. When I try to stand, my head spins.
Willem looks worriedly at Ollie. “She should have some breakfast. Shouldn’t she, Ollie?”
“I have to go to Mrs. Janssen’s. I have to tell her what happened.”
Nothing in my body wants to make that visit, but prolonging it will only be worse. Sometimes hope can be poisonous. I need to put Mrs. Janssen out of her misery as soon as I can.
Willem brings me my shoes, telling me over and over again that I don’t need to leave yet. Eventually he realizes he won’t change my mind, and wraps some bread and an apple in a napkin for me to take along. I can’t imagine eating right now, but I don’t want to tell him that. I’ll put the food in my bag as soon as I leave the apartment.
My bicycle is—I don’t even know where my bicycle is. Still in the lobby of Mrs. de Vries’s apartment, I assume, where I left it before Ollie and I took our positions at the butcher’s. In a happier version of the story, I would have ridden it home this morning after leaving Mirjam there, safe and sound.
Without a bicycle, I have to walk to Mrs. Janssen’s, which takes nearly an hour. I have a few coins in my pocket and I could catch a tram, but I think I deserve the pain. I worry along the way about how I’ll tell her. Whether it’s better to just come out and say it—“She’s dead, Mrs. Janssen”—or whether I should start from the beginning, explaining what happened and where the plan failed.
It turns out that I don’t have to say anything. Mrs. Janssen can tell, from my slumping shoulders or my rumpled clothes, or maybe just from the way I’m walking. She was waiting by the front window of her home, and when she sees me walk up the street alone, she drops her head to her chest.
“How did it happen?” she asks when she opens the door. It feels wrong to deliver the news on the steps. But then, all of this feels wrong.