What's Left

Roos was found within the fortnight, in Antwerp rather than anywhere Vermeer had thought to look first, and gave a statement that took three days to complete and named, in the end, more people than anyone at Coster & Vries had expected a single frightened man to know.

Jo heard most of it secondhand, through Vermeer’s careful phone updates and Anselm’s own account after his interviews, because the criminal side of the case had moved, by then, entirely out of an insurer’s hands and into a set of proceedings that belonged to people with badges rather than loupes. Halbrecht Kunst BV, it turned out, had existed to move paintings nobody wanted traced through countries that asked fewer questions than the Netherlands did, and Roos, once he understood that the company he’d fronted for was going to survive this considerably better than he was, cooperated with a speed that told its own story about where his loyalties had always actually sat.

“He says the panel was sold on within eighteen months,” Anselm told her, in the north room, a week after the arrest made the smaller pages of two newspapers. “To a buyer in Zurich he claims not to know the name of, which Vermeer doesn’t believe for a moment, but it’s given her something to chase that isn’t a dead end for the first time in this whole case.”

“Do you think they’ll recover it?”

“I didn’t, for a long time. I’ve started to, lately.” He said it with a carefulness that had nothing managed in it, only the honest uncertainty of a man who had learned, this year, not to promise an outcome he couldn’t actually deliver. “Vermeer’s good. Roos is frightened enough to be useful. Halbrecht’s directors are already trying to blame each other faster than any of us could have arranged it ourselves.”

Vermeer herself, when Jo asked, was more cautious than Anselm’s account had suggested, though not by much. “Zurich’s a big city to search on a name Roos may well have invented,” she said, over the phone, “but he’s given me a courier company, a date, and a crate size, and crate sizes don’t lie the way people do. I’d put better odds on recovering it than I would have a month ago. I wouldn’t put money on when.” It was, Jo thought, the kind of answer she herself might have given a client a year before — honest about the shape of an uncertainty rather than dressing it up as more or less than it was, and she found she recognised the register now the way she recognised her own reflection.

The parallel investigation moved with the bureaucratic slowness of two countries’ authorities agreeing to share information neither had asked to need, but it moved, which was more than the case had managed in nine unofficial weeks of receipts and torn pages. Halbrecht’s registered director, when finally interviewed, turned out to know almost nothing, a retired accountant paid a small annual fee to lend his name to a company he had never once visited in person. Roos alone had known what the company was actually for. Roos alone, in the end, was the one paying for it.

Els’s charges, when they came, were real and were also, in the end, survivable — a formal caution and a fraud charge that her solicitor believed, given the circumstances of duress and her voluntary cooperation, would likely resolve short of prison, though nobody involved was willing to promise that outright. She had wept, Anselm told Jo afterward, not at the charge itself but at the moment her solicitor had said survivable, as though she had spent three years assuming the word no longer applied to her.

“She asked after you,” Anselm said. “Wanted to know if you thought less of her, now that it’s all out. I told her I didn’t think that was a question you were in the business of answering for anyone.”

“I don’t think less of her. I think what she did was wrong, and I also think she spent thirty years being the kind of friend most people never get once. Both things stayed true the whole time I was finding this out. I don’t think I need to choose between them just because a charge sheet did.”

“That’s rather more grace than she was expecting.”

“It’s not grace. It’s just accuracy.” Jo said it plainly, and meant it, because she had learned, across this whole strange year, that the two were closer relatives than she’d once believed.

She visited Els herself, once, in the weeks that followed, not for the case but because it had felt wrong to let the last conversation between them stand as the one in the studio, all wariness and unfinished sentences. She found Els repainting a small landscape nobody had commissioned, hands steady again, the bruising on her arm faded to a yellow-green shadow of itself.

“I half expected you’d never come back,” Els said, not looking up from the canvas.

“I didn’t come as an insurer. I came because you asked Anselm, once, whether I’d be gentle with him, and I never told you whether I managed it.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know if gentle’s the right word for any of what happened this year. I think I was honest, mostly, and honest cost him a great deal more than gentle would have.” Jo watched her work a moment, the brush moving with the same unhurried competence Jo remembered from the first visit. “I think it cost you a great deal too. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t, or that I’m sorry it did, because I’m not. But I don’t think less of you for loving her enough to do something wrong for her sake. I wanted you to hear that from me directly, not through him.”

Els’s hand stilled on the canvas, just for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had none of its old sharpness in it. “Thank you. I didn’t think I’d get that from an insurer.”

“I’m not really here as one today.”

“No,” Els said. “I don’t suppose you are.”

· · ·Scene break

Femke called on the Sunday after the arrest, as she always did, and Jo told her the whole of it for the first time in six years of Sunday calls that had mostly consisted of careful, partial truths — the painting, the sale, the man, all of it, in an order that made sense only because she’d had a whole year to practise saying true things aloud.

Her sister was quiet for a long moment, the kitchen behind her uncharacteristically still, no children shouting, no radio. “You’ve never told me this much about anything. Not since we were girls.”

“I know.”

“Is that because of him, or because of the case?”

“Both, I think. I’m not sure any more where one stops and the other starts.” Jo said it and found it was the truest answer she had. “I’ve spent this whole year learning that saying a true thing out loud doesn’t actually cost what I always assumed it would.”

“I could have told you that for free, six years ago, if you’d ever once let me try.” Femke’s voice softened, the old fondness under the tease. “I’m glad, Jo. I mean it properly, not the way I usually say it to get you off the phone before the children start something. I’m glad you found someone who makes you sound like this.”

“Like what?”

“Awake,” Femke said, “the way I noticed back in January and didn’t push you on. I’m glad I don’t have to wonder about it any more.”

· · ·Scene break

Sanne asked her father to come to Oost on a Thursday, her flat rather than his gallery, and told him, over a meal she’d clearly put more effort into than her usual weeknight cooking, that she wanted to hear the whole of it — Annelies, the sale, Els, all of it, in order, without him deciding in advance which parts she could carry.

He told Jo about it afterwards, sitting on the small bench beneath the gallery’s front window, in a voice that had none of its old carefulness left in it.

“I told her everything. The crisis, the sale, why her mother did it, why Els agreed, why I found the ledger a year ago and put it back on the shelf instead of looking. She cried for most of it, and then she was angry, mostly at me, for the three years rather than for anything her mother did, and then, near the end, she asked whether I thought her mother had been brave or frightened when she made the decision, and I told her I thought it was possible to be both those things in the same hour, about the same choice.”

“What did she say to that?”

“That it sounded like something you’d say. She’s not wrong.” He looked at Jo properly then, something unguarded in his face that she’d learned, this year, to recognise as the truest version of him. “She said one more thing, at the door. That she was glad it was finally out, because now she gets to grieve the actual woman instead of the version I’d been curating for her. I don’t think I’ve ever been told something that hurt and helped in the same breath before.”

“That sounds like the whole of this year, honestly.”

“It does rather, doesn’t it.” He reached for her hand, the gesture entirely unremarkable between them by now, and yet she still felt it the way she’d felt it in January, a small current under something ordinary. “I told her about you as well. Properly, not as a footnote. She said, word for word, that it was about time I chose someone who’d actually correct me when I was wrong, rather than someone who’d let me manage a room.”

“I like her more every week.”

“So do I. It only took me twenty-eight years and a locked study to notice properly.”

· · ·Scene break

She went home with him that evening, for the first time without either of them making it a question first, the walk from the gallery to the canal house he’d lived in since his grandfather’s time quiet in a way that felt earned rather than avoidant, both of them past the point where either needed to fill it.

He locked the front door behind them, an ordinary domestic sound that had never once, in five months, meant anything beyond itself, and this time it did.

“I want to be plain about this,” she said, in the hallway, because plainness was the only currency she’d ever fully trusted, “before either of us goes any further than talking. I want this. I’ve wanted it since the study, maybe before, and I’m not waiting for a more convenient case to close first, because I don’t think there’s ever going to be a version of us that isn’t complicated by something.”

“I want it too. All of it. I’m not offering you a careful version tonight, or a managed one, or one I’ve already decided the shape of before you’ve had a say in it.” He said it with his old evenness gone entirely, replaced by something rawer that she found she trusted considerably more. “Tell me if that changes, at any point. I’ll stop the moment you need me to, and I won’t make it a thing between us afterward.”

“I know you will.” She said it with the same certainty she brought to a finding she’d checked four times, because she had, in her own way, checked this just as thoroughly, across five months of evenings in a locked study, and had never once found a reason to doubt it. “I’m not frightened. For the first time in longer than I can remember, about anything that actually matters, I’m not frightened at all.”

He kissed her then, unhurried the way he did everything, and led her up the stairs past the closed door of a study that held nothing left to hide from either of them, past a landing she’d first climbed behind him in February not knowing what either of them would find.

At the door to his own room he paused, just once, his hand on the frame rather than the handle, and looked at her with a question he didn’t need to voice aloud.

“Yes,” she said, plainly, because it was the only word this moment had ever needed from her.

He opened the door, and she went through it with him, and closed it behind them both.