No Answer

His reply took six hours.

"Where are you?"

No surprise in it. No emoji. Not even a warm punctuation mark. I stared at those three words, swallowed all my prepared banter, and answered with the plain truth: "Amsterdam. I was thinking of coming to Urk tomorrow."

This reply came fast: "Don't. It's not a good time."

Not a good time.

I sat up all night in an Amsterdam hotel room taking those four words apart. Not a good time meaning busy? Meaning family trouble? Or the third kind of not-a-good-time — the one I forbade myself to consider, except that a brain at 3 a.m. takes orders from no one: someone else's toothbrush in the cup is the classic not a good time.

I went anyway the next day. Don't ask why. The official finding is that I had deleted my roadmap, but my self-respect was still mid-shutdown and accepting no new requests.

Urk was exactly Urk: lighthouse, harbor, fish smell. Half a year on, even the gulls looked like the same gulls. I stood at his door — the house I'd stayed three nights in, the one with the harbor view — and rang the bell.

It wasn't him who answered.

It was a tall old man, white-haired, shoulders wide as a bow of a ship. I knew him from photos: Lucas's father. The one who'd done thirty years of business in China, the one his Qingdao partners called Lao Yang — Old Yang.

"Hello," I said in Mandarin, my voice floating with nerves, "I'm Daisy, Lucas's friend, I—"

"I know who you are." His Mandarin was crisp, correct, and cold as a shut door. "Lucas is not seeing anyone right now."

"Is he all right? I only want—"

"Young lady." He cut me off. And the way he looked at me was strange — not an elder appraising a junior. Something more vigilant. The way you look at a risk. "He is fine. Go home. There is nothing here for you."

The door closed. Not hard. Just thoroughly.

I stood outside a long time. On the second floor, one window was lit, curtain drawn. For a moment I saw a shadow move behind the curtain — tall, thin. Then the light went out.

He was home. He knew I'd come. He sent his father to close the door.

On the bus back to Amsterdam I pressed my face to the cold glass and watched the great dike recede into a black line in the dusk. My phone was hot in my grip. I called him — the first phone call I had ever placed to him. It rang through to the end. No answer.

And then I felt so stupid I could have glowed in the dark. Twenty-eight years of caution, every pothole in life successfully avoided, and I'd face-planted into the oldest one in the book: flying halfway around the planet for a man, to stand outside his locked door. Vivi and I fast-forward through this exact scene when it comes on TV.

That night I booked a flight to Rome. Three weeks early. Whatever — if there was one thing I currently had in oversupply, it was freedom, right?

The second that light upstairs went out, his own words came back to me:

"If it were a pickup, I'd have said something that felt nicer to hear."

Apparently silence works the same way. He couldn't even be bothered to reject me nicely.