Too Close

By the last week of February they had a system, unspoken and never once discussed as a system, which was the only kind Jo trusted. She came to the study on Tuesday and Friday evenings, after the gallery closed and before either of them had eaten properly, and they went through Annelies’s ledgers a shelf at a time, working outward from the torn page and the HKB stubs toward everything that had been filed around them, on the theory that a lie usually left fingerprints on the ordinary pages surrounding it, not only on itself.

It was slow work, and she had told him from the first evening that it would be, and he had not once complained about the pace the way every other client in eleven years eventually had. He brought coffee she hadn’t asked for and left it where she could reach it without breaking her concentration, and after the second evening he had stopped asking what she’d found until she told him, which she recognised, without saying so, as the single largest thing anyone had ever adjusted about themselves for her convenience.

Sanne had come up once, the weekend after she’d asked, and had sat on the floor going through a box of old exhibition catalogues for nearly two hours without once mentioning the ledgers or the gap or anything that might have turned the visit into a conversation neither of them wanted to have yet. She had found a photograph of Annelies at twenty-six, unpacking a crate at some long-closed fair, and had taken it home without asking, which Anselm had told Jo about afterward with the relief of a man whose daughter had finally taken something for herself rather than waited to be given it. Jo had said nothing to that beyond agreeing it sounded like progress, because it wasn’t her family, and she had learned, watching the two of them, exactly how much damage an outsider could do by having an opinion about a grief that wasn’t hers to manage either.

They had not found the buyer behind HKB. They had found four more entries in the older ledger, all consistent, all boring, and a receipt for framing materials that led nowhere useful, and Jo had begun to suspect that whatever the three letters meant, the answer wasn’t going to arrive through the ledgers at all, but through some document neither of them had thought to look for yet.

That Friday the study held the thin cold of a house heated for people who weren’t currently using its top floor, and Jo worked at the desk with her coat still on while Anselm sat on the floor beside the shelf, cataloguing what she’d already cleared into the neat, terrible order of a man who needed his hands occupied while his mind did something else entirely.

“You’ve gone quiet,” he said, not looking up from the box he was sorting.

“I’m reading. Reading and quiet aren’t the same thing, but they look identical from where you’re sitting.”

“They don’t, actually.” He set down the folder he was holding. “You go quiet a particular way when you’ve found something you’re deciding how to say. You go quiet a different way when you’re just working. I’ve had eight weeks to learn the difference.”

She looked up at that, because it was, without question, the most precise thing anyone outside her own profession had ever said about her, and precision from him no longer surprised her the way it had in January. “Which one is this?”

“Working. I only asked because I wanted to hear you tell me so.”

“That’s a strange thing to want.”

“Is it.” He said it plainly, the way he said most things that cost him something, and went back to the folder without pressing further, which was, she was learning, exactly how he asked for things that mattered — once, lightly, and then not again unless she gave him a reason to.

She found nothing new in the next hour, which was itself a kind of finding: three ledgers clean, ordinary, Annelies’s hand steady and untroubled across every page, no gap, no torn edge, nothing that didn’t belong. It made the anomaly around the torn page sharper by contrast, a single wrong note in an otherwise faultless bar.

“I need to tell you something,” she said, closing the last ledger, “that has nothing to do with the case.”

He set the folder aside properly this time, giving her the whole of his attention in the way she’d learned to recognise as his version of stillness. “All right.”

“Seven years ago I found a forged signature on a bill of lading, for a shipping insurer in Rotterdam. The ink tested wrong for the date on the document — a formulation that didn’t exist yet when the signature was supposedly written. It was a good finding. It would have made my name, if I’d said so out loud in the room where it mattered.” She kept her eyes on the ledger rather than on him, because this was easier to say to a closed book than to a face. “My supervisor at the time — a mentor, I’d have called him, before that year — asked to see my notes before the client meeting. I gave them to him. He presented the finding as his own, in front of six people, and I sat two seats down and said nothing, because I was more afraid of being disbelieved if I corrected him than I was of losing the credit entirely.”

“You never corrected it. Afterward, I mean.”

“No. I told myself for years it didn’t matter, because I knew what I’d found even if nobody else’s record showed it. It took me a long time to understand that knowing a true thing privately and having it exist somewhere other people could see it were not the same kind of safety.” She looked up then. “I’ve never told anyone that. Not my sister. Not Marijke. You’re the only person who knows Willem’s name in connection with what he actually did.”

“Why me?”

“Because you correct the record. Publicly, at cost to yourself, without being asked to.” She said it and heard how much larger it was than she’d meant it to sound, and didn’t take it back. “I wanted to know what it felt like to say a true thing to someone who wouldn’t let it just sit there unclaimed.”

Anselm was quiet long enough that she thought she might have said too much after all, and she made herself sit with the silence rather than fill it, because filling it would have been its own kind of retraction.

“Thank you,” he said, finally. “Not for telling me. For deciding I was the one you’d tell.”

“Don’t make it sound like a gift. It’s not comfortable, being the only person who knows something that shameful about me.”

“It’s not shameful. You were younger, and you trusted someone who’d earned the trust before he spent it badly.” He said it without any softness added to make it easier to hear, which was, she was learning, the only kind of comfort he seemed to know how to offer anyone. “I’d have wanted to know, if I’d been the one standing in that room. I’d have wanted someone to say your name.”

“Nobody did.”

“I know. That’s rather the point of you telling me now.” When he spoke again, it wasn’t about Willem.

“I’ve been deciding what Sanne can bear to hear about her mother for three years,” he said. “I told myself it was protection. It’s mostly been convenience — mine, not hers — because it’s easier to manage a version of the truth than to sit with someone while they have the real one. I did the same thing to you a little, that first week, letting you think I was simply a careful man rather than a frightened one who’d found a system that let him look careful instead.”

“You’re not the only one who’s confused those two things.”

“No. I don’t imagine either of us is.” He got up from the floor then, unhurried, and came to stand near the desk rather than across it, close enough that she was aware, in a way she hadn’t quite let herself be aware of anything in that room before, of exactly how little space was actually between them. “I keep thinking I should apologise for how much of this house I’ve let you into. The study. Whatever this is, between the ledgers.”

“You haven’t let me into anything I didn’t ask for.”

“You asked for a room. I think you know I’ve given you rather more than that.” He wasn’t touching her — she would think, afterward, that it was the not touching that undid her, the sheer deliberateness of a man choosing not to close a distance he clearly wanted closed — and the look he gave her instead did something she had no cross-section for, no polarising filter that would resolve it into a fact she could write down and trust.

She felt the pull of it the way she felt the pull of an answer before she’d verified it: immediate, physical, and entirely unearned by proof. Her whole career had been built on refusing exactly that feeling until it survived a second look, a third, a fourth. She made herself hold his gaze one more second, long enough to be certain she wasn’t inventing what she saw in it, and found she wasn’t.

That was the part that frightened her.

“Don’t,” she said, and stepped back, putting the desk between them again on purpose, because distance was the only instrument she had left that she still trusted. “Not — I don’t mean don’t feel it. I don’t think either of us gets to decide that from here. I mean don’t look at me like that yet. Not until I’ve told my supervisor what this is.”

“Jo—“

“I have to be able to trust that I’m reading this correctly, Anselm, and I can’t trust my own reading of anything while I’m still the person who might clear your gallery’s name and also the person standing this close to you in your dead wife’s study.” Her voice held, which surprised her, given what the rest of her was doing. “That’s not me managing you. That’s me asking for the one thing I actually know how to do, which is not calling a result before I’ve checked it properly.”

He didn’t move to close the distance she’d just made. She would understand later that this, more than anything he’d said all evening, was what told her she’d been right to trust him with Willem’s name.

“Then I won’t,” he said. “Look at you like that. Until you’ve told her.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me for the bare minimum of not making this harder for you than it already is.” A ghost of the dry humour she’d first heard in January, back when neither of them had known what they were actually standing in front of. “I can wait. I’ve had considerable practice waiting for things I wasn’t sure I was allowed to want.”

“That’s not a comforting sentence.”

“It wasn’t meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true.” He picked the folder back up, giving his hands something to do, the same reflex she’d watched him use all evening, and she understood, watching him do it now, that they had simply swapped which one of them needed the task to survive the moment. “I’ll see you Tuesday.”

“Tuesday,” she agreed, and gathered her things with hands that were, for the first time in eleven years of doing this work, not entirely steady, and did not examine that fact until she was three streets away and it was too late to go back and make the room say anything different.

She had told him the truth about Willem. She had told herself the truth about what she wanted, standing at that desk, for exactly as long as it took to name it and put it away again.

She had not yet told Marijke anything at all, and walking to the tram in the dark, she understood, with the same cold clarity she brought to a cross-section under the lens, that Tuesday was no longer a date on a calendar. It was a decision she had just made out loud, in front of a witness, and there was no way now to unmake it without also unmaking whatever this had already become.