People ask me how it started, and I never quite know where to begin. Not with the canal, though that’s where it happened. Not with the café, though that’s where everything shifted. I usually start with the fact that I almost didn’t go — that I had a hundred reasons to stay home that Saturday in October, and only one reason to show up. Her name was Nana Choi, and at the time, I told myself she was just my colleague.
I should have known better. But that’s the thing about slow-burn — you don’t feel the heat until you’re already standing in it.
It was Rafael’s idea to have the team lunch in Amsterdam. He was our project lead, absurdly enthusiastic about “cultural bonding,” which in practice meant he’d booked a long table at a canal-side café in the Jordaan district and told everyone attendance was “strongly encouraged.” Rafael had a gift for making optional things feel mandatory. So there we were — six of us from the research team, crammed around a table under a green-striped awning, the canal glittering just below the railing, bicycles ticking past on the bridge above.
Nana was already there when I arrived. She was reading something on her phone, one elbow on the table, her dark hair tucked behind one ear. She looked up when I pulled out the chair beside her — not across from her, beside her, which I would later decide was either fate or poor spatial reasoning on my part — and she gave me the kind of half-smile that meant she’d noticed I was seven minutes late but wasn’t going to make it a thing.
“You look like you ran here,” she said.
“I walked very quickly,” I told her. “There’s a difference.”
She went back to her phone. I ordered a coffee. Rafael arrived three minutes later with Simona Alves, who immediately launched into a story about a boat tour she’d taken the previous weekend, gesturing so broadly that she nearly knocked over the breadbasket. The table filled with noise and laughter. Jia Lin was across from us, arguing cheerfully with Ignacio about whether stroopwafels were overrated. Someone had ordered a round of jenever without asking anyone, which felt like a very Rafael move.
And then Nana leaned slightly toward me — not enough to be noticed, just enough — and murmured, “Do you think Rafael knows that ‘cultural bonding’ is just a phrase he invented?”
I kept my face straight. “I think Rafael believes many things that no one has confirmed for him.”
She pressed her lips together, suppressing something. And I felt it — that small, warm thing that had been building between us for months, quiet as a current under still water.
We’d been working together for eight months. Eight months of shared spreadsheets and late-afternoon coffee runs and the particular intimacy of sitting three desks apart from someone you find increasingly difficult to stop thinking about. I’d told myself it was nothing. I’d told myself she was brilliant and focused and completely uninterested in anything that might complicate her work life. I’d told myself a lot of things.
The afternoon stretched on lazily. The canal caught the October light in long, pale ribbons. Someone brought out a plate of bitterballen and Simona declared them life-changing. Ignacio and Jia Lin’s argument had evolved into something about Dutch architecture. Rafael was on his second jenever and beginning to monologue about the project’s Q4 targets in a way that everyone was politely ignoring.
Nana and I had drifted into our own quiet orbit, the way we sometimes did in the office when a meeting ran long and we’d catch each other’s eye over someone’s head. She told me about a paper she’d been reading, and I told her about a walk I’d taken along the Prinsengracht that morning before everyone else was awake, and somehow we ended up talking about what it felt like to be in a city that wasn’t yours — that particular loneliness that was also, somehow, freedom.
“You like being a little lost,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I like the version of myself that shows up when I don’t know where I’m going,” I said, which was more honest than I’d meant to be.
She looked at me for a moment — really looked, the way she didn’t often do in the office, where everything was professional and measured. Then she said, quietly, “I think I know that version.”
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