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

group—a group Martijn had convinced the Dutch government to support. Martijn had found out just in time and stopped Pieter from taking the images to the news agencies by paying him off. Pieter had agreed to the deal, apparently unable to say no to the money—but he had also insisted that if he died, the payout would be made to his widow and daughter. Did Pieter worry that, after what he’d uncovered, the rebels would have him killed anyway? Grace still didn’t know the answer to that question.

But finally, that at least provided Grace with an explanation for the money they had received through Martijn after Pieter’s death. The fact that Pieter had been willing to take a bribe and withhold important evidence of an international scandal seemed…well, unlike Pieter. But Grace knew he’d faced a difficult choice. Maybe she would find out more information about him—as Martijn had evidently tried to do—by looking into his old files, going back to the days in South Africa.

Grace would have to reconcile this new image of her first husband with the one she had built up around him since his death, but at least it helped her think of him as a fallible human rather than a martyr. Thinking of him that way would be good for Karin too, for whom all of this was much harder and would involve many conversations, she guessed, over many years. Their lives would never be simple or easy.

Anyway, it seemed that Martijn’s accounting firm had always been a front for his illegal operations. He’d indeed inherited it from his father, but he barely did real financial work there. Still, it had come in handy when he needed to give Grace the payout.

Although she had refused contact with him after his arrest in the Veluwe, Martijn had written Grace a letter. In it, he had tried to explain what happened to him. He wrote, “You may think now that everything between us was a lie, but it wasn’t. From the moment I met you at Pieter’s memorial service, I was already in love with you. When you came to my office that first time, I told myself not to get involved, but I realized how much I had done to destroy your world, and I wanted to help. At first, it was that. And then I just wanted you to be my wife. I wanted to make things better for you.”

But as their lives progressed, he had realized the walls were caving in on him. Some other reporters had been sniffing around the situation in Syria and the government’s support of the Salafists. And maybe Martijn had started to worry that Pieter somehow had gotten the photographs out, in spite of the payoff and the secrecy. He had tried to find out what he could about Pieter, but he couldn’t find all of what he needed to know. He became convinced that he had to destroy the photos to be safe and to be able to escape prosecution.

“It was my stress,” he wrote to Grace, “that made me turn angry and aggressive. I never wanted to hurt you or Karin—that was never my intention.”

What did it matter now? thought Grace. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to try to forget everything that had happened and move on with her life. Her recovery was a small part of it, but her focus now was on Karin. She’d lost her father to violence, and she’d been a victim of an assault by her stepfather. How would she ever trust men again? What could Grace do to help her daughter go out into the world without feeling terrified or suspicious? These were the things they had to work through now. They had counselors, they had friends, they had a lot of attention from all kinds of professionals, if they wanted it. But for the moment, they first had to get through this.

Grace had done her best to keep her daughter out of the media storm so Karin could recover emotionally, get on with school, and try to find her way back to a normal life. This was the first time they would see Martijn in person, hopefully just briefly, since the dropping. Karin, although scared to death of this moment, had also been looking forward to it as a time when she could take the power back into her hands. That was important. Her mother, still holding Karin’s hand, gave it a hard squeeze.

Ms. Oppenbauers had instructed her in what to do. All that was expected of her today was to explain how she had found in the woods the box that contained the memory stick. Well, of course, it wasn’t all that simple. But the evidence she had provided to the court was essential to the prosecution. And she had to answer a few questions about how she had obtained it. Martijn would be in the courtroom, but Grace had told her that she didn’t have to look at him, didn’t have to point him out, didn’t have to interact with him at all. Karin understood.

Grace hadn’t always been viewed favorably by the prosecutorial team. At first, Ms. Oppenbauers had her held and questioned as a possible accomplice, because the link between her first husband and her second had been strong. It was hard for them to understand why she hadn’t known about it. But it didn’t take long for the prosecutor’s office to believe her, especially after Detective van Dijk explained how the events in the park had unfolded. She had also promised to share everything she had with them—which she soon discovered was quite a lot.

This was part of her recovery too, said her new therapist. It was time she stopped beating herself up about “not knowing more at the time” or “not seeing people for who they really are” or “being blind to what was happening all around her”—all the ways she blamed herself for what had happened. By working with the prosecution and learning