On the Record

Marijke called the meeting for the following Monday, ten o’clock, the same room, the same view of the Zuidas that nobody in it ever looked at, and this time the calendar invite listed Jo’s name first.

Grey — reopened finding — J. Achterberg presenting. Jo read it three times before she let herself believe it wasn’t a clerical error, and then a fourth time, because four had always been the number that made a thing safe to trust.

“You disclosed the conflict eleven weeks ago,” Marijke had told her, on the phone the Friday before, in the flat, administrative voice she used for decisions she’d already finished making. “You disclosed it before anyone forced it out of you, and the client himself has now disclosed the underlying fraud, formally, in writing, naming the relationship as part of his own statement rather than something anyone had to dig for. That’s not…