The List

I keep a list. Not for groceries — those I remember without writing them down — but for the mornings. Coffee, black. Feed the cat. Wipe the counter twice, because once never actually gets it clean, no matter what people tell themselves. Then the drawer by the door, the one with the spare key nobody else knows about, just to check it's still there.

I've always liked routines. People find that unsettling in a woman my age — the precision of it, the way I don't deviate. My mother used to say I had a place for everything and God help you if you moved it. She wasn't wrong. She also stopped saying it, eventually.

The neighbors think I'm quiet. Helpful, even — I bring in their bins on Tuesdays if they forget, water the Van Dijks' plants when they're away. Mrs. Van Dijk gave me a key years ago. I've never used it for anything she'd mind.

Yesterday a man came to the door asking about the house two down — the one that's been empty since March. Clipboard, lanyard, the kind of smile people wear when they're trying not to look like they're prying. Said he was checking in for a concerned relative. I told him I hadn't seen much activity there either, which was true, in the sense that I don't let myself be seen.

I made him a coffee. He didn't finish it. People rarely do — something about the way I watch them drink it, I think, though I've never asked. He left his card behind — Joost van Dalen, it said — and I put it in the drawer with the others. Fourteen, now, if you're counting.

I am.

Tonight, before bed, I'll do what I always do: check the drawer, water the plants that aren't mine, and stand for a moment at the window of the room at the end of the hall — the one I keep locked, the one that hasn't needed dusting in exactly four weeks, because nothing in there moves anymore to make the dust settle wrong.

Then I'll sleep. I always sleep well. People assume that means something. It doesn't. Fourteen is a good number to fall asleep on.

She came by on a Thursday, three weeks after the fact — the way people do when they've spent all that time telling themselves it's nothing, then run out of ways to believe it.

I recognized the car before I recognized her. A rental sticker in the corner of the windscreen, and a woman behind the wheel who sat for a full minute before she got out.

Marieke, she introduced herself. Joost's sister.

"He came by here a few weeks ago," she said, still standing on the step. "Asking questions. For a client, he said." A pause. "He hasn't called anyone since." She watched my face the way people watch a door they're not sure is locked.

"Coffee?" I asked. "How do you take it?"

"Two sugars, no milk." The same as Joost, I remember thinking — the kind of detail people share without ever noticing it runs in the family.

Marieke didn't drink it. She held the cup with both hands and looked around my kitchen the way you look at a room in a house you're thinking of buying — cataloguing exits, I realized, a little late to be useful to either of us. Her eyes caught on the drawer by the door. Just for a second. Long enough that I knew she'd noticed it was the kind of drawer a person locks.

"Did he say anything else?" she asked. "Before he left?"

"He left his card," I said. "I can find it, if it helps."

"It won't." She said it quickly, like she'd practiced not wanting it to.

I've found honesty is more disarming than refusing to answer. Every word I gave her was true. I've never seen much use in lying when the truth serves just as well.

Marieke left before finishing her cup. Backed out of the driveway faster than the street really allows. I watched her taillights until they turned the corner, then went back inside, poured her coffee down the sink, and added Joost's card to the drawer. Fifteen, now.

I don't think she believed me. I think she just couldn't prove otherwise, which isn't the same thing, and she knows it. People like that don't let it go. They just get quieter about it.

I'll need to be a little more careful for a while. Fifteen is easy enough to explain away, if it ever comes to that. It's sixteen that gets people asking real questions.

Sanne next door started leaving her light on at night about two months ago. Not the porch light — the bedroom one, upstairs, burning long past when reasonable people sleep. I noticed because I notice things like that. It's practically the job.

Sanne came round one afternoon to return a casserole dish, and I saw the mark on her wrist before she tugged her sleeve down over it. Neither of us mentioned it. That's usually how these things go, in my experience — the not-mentioning.

"Everything alright at home?" I asked, because someone has to ask, even when they already know the answer.

"Fine," she said. "Mark's just — he's under a lot of pressure at work."

Mark. Her husband, though she rarely called him that outright — always just his name, the way people do when saying the word "husband" out loud might make it a promise they're not sure they want to keep anymore.

I told her that sounded difficult. I meant it, in a way. Pressure does strange things to people. So does patience, when you run out of it on someone else's behalf.

I started bringing round extra portions when I cooked. Small things. A key left under the mat, "in case." People let you into their lives faster than you'd think, if you're patient, and you smell like fabric softener instead of trouble.

Mark stopped coming home on a Tuesday. Sanne told the neighbours he'd left her — packed a bag, gone quiet, the way some men do when the pressure finally gets to be too much. She seemed relieved, more than anything. I didn't correct her.

Mark's card is in the drawer now too, the one from his gym, dog-eared, still smelling faintly of chlorine. Sixteen. I sat with that number a moment longer than I usually do.

"I don't know what I'd have done without you," Sanne said, over coffee, a week later. Her sleeves were rolled up for the first time in months.

"You'd have managed," I said. "People usually do."

"Still. Thank you."

I told her it was nothing. Mostly, I meant that too.

Sixteen is a bigger number than I let myself think about, most days. But some messes need clearing more than others. I don't know if that's true. I know it's what I tell myself before I sleep.

Marieke came back on a Sunday, which should have told me something by itself — people don't usually choose Sundays for casual visits. She brought company this time: a man in a grey coat who introduced himself as Bakker, though he didn't say what kind of Bakker, detective or otherwise, and I decided not to ask directly, since asking is what people do when they've got something to hide.

"Bakker's helping me look into it properly," Marieke said, standing half a step behind him on my porch, the way people stand when they've decided someone else should go through a door first that might not want opening.

I invited them both in. Coffee, I offered, though Marieke shook her head before I'd finished the sentence, and Bakker only said thank you, which told me he intended to stay long enough to drink it.

Bakker asked good questions — better than Marieke's had been, weeks ago. Questions with a shape to them, the kind that circle back on themselves to see if the answers still match the second time around. I gave him the same true things I'd given her, and a few new true things besides, because he seemed like the sort of man who'd notice a story that got smoother with each telling, and I've never seen the use in smoothing something that doesn't need it.

Marieke didn't say much. She watched instead — the drawer, mostly, the way she had the first time, except now she wasn't the only one looking. Bakker's eyes went there too, once, just long enough that I understood she'd told him about it.

"Mind if I use your bathroom?" he asked, near the end, in the easy voice people use when they want to walk through the rest of your house without asking to walk through the rest of your house.

I told him of course, and gave him directions he didn't really need — he'd have found it regardless, that type always does — and listened to his footsteps take the long way down the hall. Past the bathroom door. Toward the one at the end that stays locked.

Bakker didn't try the handle. I'll give him that much credit. But he stood outside it a moment longer than a man simply passing by would, and when he came back to the kitchen his questions had a different shape to them — sharper, aimed lower, the kind that aren't really questions so much as a way of telling you what he already suspects.

I answered those too. Every one, the same as always.

They left together, Marieke and her detective, and from the window I watched them sit in the car for a long time without driving off — talking, I assumed, comparing notes, deciding what came next. I didn't need to hear it to know roughly what they'd decided.

Seventeen would have been simple, once. A quiet inconvenience, a card in a drawer. Seventeen and eighteen, sitting together in a car outside my house, comparing notes — that's a different kind of number altogether.

I put the kettle on anyway. Some habits don't care what's coming.