Watching From Outside

Eleven days off a file changed the shape of an office in ways nobody warned you about. Jo still came in at the same hour, still logged the same cases that had nothing to do with a seventeenth-century panel and everything to do with flooded warehouses and a stolen delivery van in Almere, and found that the work itself hadn’t dimmed so much as gone slightly out of focus, like a photograph taken a half-second before the shutter caught.

Marijke asked after her twice that week, briefly, in the corridor rather than the office, which Jo understood to be its own kind of consideration. “You’re eating,” Marijke said, on the Tuesday, not quite a question. “You look like a woman who isn’t.”

“I’m eating.”

“Good.” Marijke didn’t press further, which was itself unusual enough that Jo noted it the way she noted everything, filed and unweighted, a fact that might…