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,…