Jo had offered to come with him, twice, and he had said no both times, and the second no had cost him more than the first because by then he understood she was right to offer and he still wasn’t going to accept.
“It has to be you,” she’d said, in the study, the receipt book still open between them. “Not because I don’t want to be there. Because if I’m in the room, she’ll be answering the insurer, and I need her to answer her oldest friend’s husband instead. Those are different confessions, and only one of them is any use to you.”
He had known she was right and resented it anyway, the whole tram ride to the Jordaan, the way a man resents the person who has correctly identified the hardest version of a thing and then declined to spare him it.
He had rehearsed nothing. That…
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