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

“Looottttaaaaaa?” she cried out. “Helllloooooo???” she shouted, her voice singsong, and waited, this time hearing faint reverberations, as if she were calling out inside a cave.

Just like that, she thought. And just like that, so fast, I’m alone?

Chapter 10File Folders

Grace had held on to Martijn’s ACCOUNTING card through Pieter’s memorial reception for no particular reason, except that it was something to clutch in her hand so she wouldn’t reach for a cigarette. She’d given up smoking when she was pregnant, for good. She’d kept the card in her pocket until she’d arrived at the sad little storefront in a blocky modernist office building to meet Martijn van Roosendaal like a woman in search of a soothsayer.

She had barely noticed the midcentury furniture positioned like building blocks on the slate-gray carpeting or the mousy brunette with the near-bouffant who tried to block her way into Martijn’s office. He recognized her immediately, and came out into the hallway to welcome her into his chambers.

“My father founded this accounting firm with his twin brother,” Martijn explained once he’d seated her and settled himself again behind a wide oak desk, appearing far more ordinary, and handsome, with his beard shaved off, and not at all like the wise man in colorful silks she’d imagined in her hallucinatory anguish. “I’ve expanded it into some other areas,” he continued, then added more pointedly, leaning forward and looking right into Grace’s eyes, “with your husband’s help.”

Grace felt her heart muscle squeeze and knew a wave of sadness was coming in, like seagulls sensing a storm. “My husband’s help,” she repeated, but it didn’t make sense to her. What help could Pieter possibly have given to an accounting firm?

“I’m sorry, late husband,” said Martijn, as if that was the area of confusion. “I want you to know that Pieter was not only a client to me but someone I counted as a dear friend.”

Grace didn’t know what to do with this information. Pieter had never mentioned a Martijn van Roosendaal to her, and she was sure she’d met all his friends. None of them, as far as she knew, worked in polished faux-vintage offices with glass walls and persnickety receptionists out front. Not a one of them seemed anywhere near so established.

What came out through the subsequent discussion, however, confused her even more—Pieter had accumulated a great deal of wealth in the last year or two, working with Martijn, apparently, and this left Grace and Karin, as Martijn put it, “in a very strong position financially.” Martijn was methodical in laying it all out for her, explaining that she only had to sign some papers, here and here, to be able to move the income into her own accounts.

Yes, that was how she’d met Martijn, over financial paperwork, and somehow, over time, they’d fallen in love. Probably a lot of it had to do with his looks, his charm, his apparent eagerness to support the grieving widow, as well as her own desire to make life easier and safer and more, well, normal.

Grace hadn’t thought a lot afterward about the idea that Martijn and Pieter had been “friends.” She had assumed it had been an overstatement on his part, perhaps to make her feel more confident. But now, as she rifled through this folder, with the photograph of her and Pieter as young lovebirds, she wondered: was it possible that Martijn had somehow known them without her knowing him? There turned out to be a lot of pictures of the two of them way back when, as well as a copy of Pieter and Grace’s wedding invitation from 1998. That was definitely odd. How could she not have known him then?

They’d held the ceremony in the tiny garden of a friend’s house in Muizenberg, near the bar where they’d met two years earlier; way too many people were crammed into the space, but there was lots of music. They’d told everyone to bring an instrument, and just as they exchanged rings, the whole backyard filled with cacophonous sound, and there was playing and singing and dancing until dawn. Even if they’d actually known Martijn back then, he would not have fit into that scene.

Grace started to have a strange tickling feeling in the back of her throat, and when she swallowed it seemed like she was trying to digest a big lump of something hard and prickly.

What could be the explanation for this? She pawed through the other documents in the file and saw other artifacts of Pieter and Grace’s old life—more discolored photographs of the two of them taken from afar. They were weird pictures, not images she’d ever seen before, and definitely not taken by anyone in her family. There was nothing intimate or familial about them. They again seemed to be pictures taken by someone who was observing them, from quite a distance. Maybe even spying on them. Yes, that was it. “Surveilling” was the word. These seemed to be images taken by a private detective or maybe Dutch intelligence, or even an FBI agent? To what end? For what purpose?

It was, in a word, creepy. Surveillance images of Pieter, and not just of Pieter but also of Grace and even of little Karin when she was just a toddler. Once she understood the unlikely and, well, rather creepy perspective of these images, she started to look at the rest of the paperwork in the file in a different way.

These were records of their whereabouts, lists of times and places of their trips. Obviously trips Pieter had taken for his work—for reporting—but also, it seemed, some family trips. The records continued on through their move to the Netherlands, which had happened just before Grace gave birth to Karin. There was also a photograph of tiny baby Karin in the arms of Grace, with Grace’s mother—now long dead. None of these had been taken up close; apparently they had been again taken with a zoom lens, since they too were extremely grainy.

Who had