You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

never talked about his work with her, not ever. What a contrast he was to Pieter, who had so captivated her with his work stories that she’d fallen not really into his arms but into the universe of his job. Well, at least an accountant wasn’t someone who would find himself in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. Boring, in this case, was safe.

The top drawer stopped at the Gs; she closed it and opened the next, walking her fingers forward through the folder labels to HOOGENDIJK, since one always does seek out one’s self. As in Pieter Hoogendijk, since he had been a client. Or in this case, GRACE AND PIETER HOOGENDIJK.

Grace had met Martijn for the first time at Pieter’s memorial service. He’d approached her during the reception, seemingly out of nowhere, and pressed his business card into her hand. MARTIJN VAN ROOSENDAAL, it had read. ACCOUNTING. She had looked at the black print on the plain white rectangle, and in her haze of grief had grasped only the spiritual sense of the word “accounting,” as in reckoning.

It was in that same bewildered spirit, still lost in grief and seeking answers, that she had dialed the number on Martijn’s card a week later at 11 p.m., after hours of weeping, hoping that this mysterious man, shrouded in a very large dark-brown beard with kind green eyes, would somehow help her make sense of what had happened. It hadn’t occurred to her immediately, or in any concrete sense, that he was the actual accountant of Pieter’s personal finances.

The thick GRACE AND PIETER HOOGENDIJK file she had in her hands now must have been started when Martijn met Pieter, a few years earlier. It certainly looked like a relic of another era, yellow and aged to the point that it seemed like someone had used a lighter to singe its edges. She opened it out of sheer curiosity, not expecting to find anything more surprising than bank statements, notarial deeds, and ancient tax forms.

The first thing that fell out, though, right into her lap, was a photograph of the two of them, her and Pieter, when they were much younger, in South Africa, many years ago. That was funny. What was a photograph from that era doing in Martijn’s bookkeeping? She pulled the picture closer to her face to try to figure out what image this was and when it had been taken.

This was an old one, shot long before Karin was born, when they had only just met. Funny—it wasn’t one of her photographs, definitely not one of his. They didn’t seem to be posing for it, but you could see both their faces pretty clearly, in spite of the wild hair they both had then. This wasn’t one of the photos contained in any of their family albums, of that she was sure. Who had taken it?

It was clearly Cape Town, because she recognized the palm trees and the colorful cabins on Muizenberg Beach in the background. She did know exactly where it was taken—not far from one of their favorite bars, actually the place they’d met, a real dive called the Black Swan. Her best guess was that it was taken around that time, 1996. Back then, she’d been twenty-four and met this unruly thirty-six-year-old Dutch photojournalist who spoke with a funny accent and had a million crazy stories, at a bar where she’d gone to listen to jazz.

She recognized her younger self in that picture—what, nearly a quarter of a century ago now?—her hair cropped into a curly bob, with bangs falling into her face. Pieter with his long hair, looking like skin and bones under a T-shirt that hung off him like a tent. Ha. When she’d met him she’d immediately insulted him by saying, “I thought Dutch people were supposed to be tall,” to which he’d laughed and explained that stereotypes always had exceptions. He was just barely as tall as she, five foot nine.

But he loomed over her in so many other ways. Pieter was already a veteran war photographer by then, having covered the Iran-Iraq War, the Lebanese Civil War, the bombing of Libya. He’d launched into photojournalism right out of secondary school in Amsterdam, not even nineteen, never gave a thought to university, even though he’d aced all his exams. He’d just gone off with a Leica to Syria during the first Islamist uprising there, on his own. “That was seriously stupid,” he confessed to her, twining his fingers with hers at that jazz bar, maybe boldly and too soon. “I almost got killed the first day.”

He still had the scar on his belly to prove how stupid he’d been, he told her. Did she want to see it? Yes, he’d been one of those cowboy gonzo photojournalists of the 1980s, fearless, reckless, and ultimately insanely lucky to have made it out alive. How sexy was all of that to her at the time! He talked a mile a minute about war and competing tribes and CIA informants and weapons traders and government complicity and human rights and aid organizations and who was doing what to endanger or save humanity, and to her, back then, everything he said was genuinely, truly fascinating.

Pieter was thirty-eight when they married, two years later, quite a lot older than Grace, and that seemed hard to her at the time. But the years passed, and suddenly she herself was thirty-eight, and she realized that if she wasn’t going to have kids with this wild man, she wasn’t going to have kids.

Pieter claimed by then that he had mellowed, and he regretted his youthful bravado, even if he still loved to show off the puncture wounds in his left hip, where he’d gotten grazed by bullets in Libya, or the scar just below his collarbone where he’d been whacked with a Rwandan rebel’s machete. She, too, counted herself lucky that he was alive.

And then, after all that, when Karin was ten, he wasn’t anymore. All the bad