PART 11 — The Meeting in Rotterdam
The silence in the small flower shop was oppressive. The only sound was the soft ticking of an old clock on the wall and the hubbub of the busy shopping crowd outside on the street.
Hannah stared at me with a gaze that quickly shifted from astonishment to distrust. "Thomas…?" she whispered. "The man from the letters?"
I nodded slowly. "My husband. He died five years ago."
Hannah swallowed hard. She quickly turned the sign on the door from 'Open' to 'Closed' and drew the curtains. Then she motioned for me to follow her into the small back room of the shop, where the scent of damp earth and eucalyptus lingered. There stood a small table with two wooden chairs and an electric kettle.
"Sit down, Mrs.… Maria," she said with a trembling voice. She poured coffee for both of us. Her hands rattled slightly against the porcelain.
"You know about my existence?" she asked as she sat down across from me.
"Since yesterday," I answered honestly. "I found a letter from Thomas that he had sent to me after his death. He wrote that you are his daughter."
Hannah let out a deep sigh and leaned back. "My whole life, my mother told me my father was a secret agent who died on a mission for his country. She rarely spoke about him, but every month money arrived through a lawyer for my studies and for this shop. Three years ago, shortly before my mother died, she gave me a small wooden box with some old letters from him. In them, he called himself 'Thomas'. But there was no last name, no photo, nothing."
I pulled the old photo from my purse—the photo I had taken from Elena's wooden box—and laid it on the table.
Hannah looked at the photo. Her eyes widened as she recognized the young woman in the picture. "That… that's my mother Sofia," she whispered. Her fingers glided carefully over the image. "And the man beside her… is that him?"
"That's Thomas," I said quietly. "Your father."
Hannah began to cry softly. They weren't tears of grief, but tears of a lifelong search that had finally found a face. "I wanted to know who he was my whole life. Why did he never visit us? Why did he keep us hidden?"
I grabbed her hand. It felt strange—the hand of my husband's daughter from another life—yet at the same time, it felt completely natural.
"He kept you hidden to protect you, Hannah," I explained. I briefly told her about the network, the extortion, the warehouse, and the danger that had accompanied Thomas his entire life. I told her about the raid at the monastery and—with a lump in my throat—what had happened to my son Julian.
Hannah listened breathlessly, her eyes fixed on me. "Good heavens… What a horrible nightmare you've had to go through, Maria. And all because of my father's secrets."
"He wanted to protect both of us," I said. "But he made the mistake of thinking he could carry everything alone. Secrets are like weeds in a garden, Hannah. If you don't pull them out, they end up suffocating everything that grows."
Hannah smiled weakly through her tears. "That sounds like the language of a true gardener."
"Thomas was one, too," I smiled along. "A gardener who forgot that roses have thorns, too."
We talked for hours. About Thomas, about her mother Sofia, about the life she had built in Rotterdam. I discovered that Hannah was a warm, caring woman, full of passion for her work and her little shop. She had no family, just as I was now largely alone.
Around five in the afternoon, I stood up to say goodbye. I had to catch the train back home.
"Are you coming back, Maria?" Hannah asked at the door of the shop. A hopeful tone echoed in her voice.
I looked at her, and for the first time in months, the weight in my chest felt lighter. "Only if you promise to come over to my house for soup sometime. I know a wonderful recipe your father used to make for me."
Hannah spontaneously hugged me. It was a warm, firm embrace. "Deal," she said.
As I walked back to the Rotterdam station, the city didn't feel so hectic and cold anymore. I felt lighter. The lies of the past were finally cleaned up. Thomas had made mistakes, but his daughter was a wonderful person.
Yet just as I stepped onto the platform and saw my train pulling in, the mobile phone in my purse rang.
It was Inspector De Vos.
"Maria," De Vos said with a very urgent voice. "Where are you right now?"
"At the Rotterdam station," I replied, surprised. "Nothing bad has happened, I hope?"
"Yes," De Vos grimly said. "Julian managed to escape during his transport to prison this morning. He knocked out a guard and stole a car. We searched his cell and found a note."
My stomach turned. "What was on that note?"
"It had only a single sentence on it, Maria," De Vos said. 'I know where the lost daughter is. The trail ends where it began.'
"Maria! Julian is on his way to Rotterdam!" De Vos shouted through the phone.
I looked around panickedly on the bustling platform, and there, behind a large concrete pillar, I saw a familiar figure standing.
Julian. He wore a black hoodie, his face half-hidden, and his eyes fixed straight on me…
* * *
