What Annelies Knew

It was the second Tuesday since the photograph on her doormat, and Jo had spent the walk over doing the thing she did with every fear she couldn’t yet resolve: filing it, unweighted, in the part of herself that kept working regardless. No further envelopes. No further footsteps she could swear to. Only the ordinary business of an investigation nobody had authorised her to keep running, continuing anyway because stopping had never once been a genuine option, whatever the reassignment form said.

Anselm had cleared the desk properly for the first time since February, the ledgers stacked by year rather than left in whatever order the previous evening had abandoned them, and she recognised it as a small, private tidiness — the kind a man reached for when the actual mess in front of him refused to be tidied at all.

“I went back through the cellar boxes again on…