Eva Had Pressed Save

Eva's office was above a physiotherapy practice. A poster on the stairs showed a back with every muscle drawn separately. Lena had often seen it when dropping off a box of documents. Now she stopped on the landing to fasten her bag properly. She did not need the box. Two versions of the same report were in her bag, enough to make the evening unpleasant.

Eva opened the door before Lena rang. Her glasses were on top of her head and she held a mug with the teabag still in it.

‘I thought you were coming in.’

‘I'm closing my bag.’

Eva stepped aside. Her computer was on; beside it stood a pile of documents marked with pink sticky notes. The visitor's chair had been cleared. A coat lay on the floor where Lena usually put her bag. Eva picked it up and hung it on the door.

‘I've got the files ready,’ she said.

Lena sat down and laid the printouts side by side. Eva looked from the original report to the export and took her glasses off her head.

‘You're acting as though I've taken over all your work.’

‘It says the house has been empty since 31 March. I was there with the tenant on 6 May. It lists defects I never established. My initials are underneath.’

‘You don't need that tone.’

Lena kept her hands still. ‘What tone would you like for this sentence?’

Eva put down her mug. The teaspoon struck the rim and fell on the table. She left it there.

‘I assembled it as agreed. The client sent additional information. I normally include that.’

‘A departure date isn't an address correction. You knew I'd spoken to her.’

‘There could have been an arrangement you didn't know about.’

‘Then you ask. You leave my observation in place. You say who supplied the other information.’

Eva turned to the screen and opened a folder. The first file was not the report but a list of property handovers. She closed it. Lena did not point at the computer.

‘I want to hear what you did. We can look at the documents afterwards.’

‘Now you've given it to the police, I'm supposed to make sure I use the right words.’

‘Use your own.’

Eva pushed back from the desk. Her chair wheels caught on the edge of a thin rug. She held it down with one foot and pulled the chair free. Her face reddened from the small effort, or from what remained unsaid.

‘Niels sent the revised information,’ she said. ‘You know that, really.’

‘I've seen his request. I don't yet know which parts you replaced yourself afterwards. What exactly did he send?’

‘Text. The property's status. Findings from the maintenance side. He said the move was arranged and your report was behind the records.’

Lena looked at the first page. Behind. A visit with a resident present had become an event that no longer belonged to the correct version of reality.

‘My report was from the day before.’

‘I know.’

‘What did he say about Sofie?’

‘That she was just collecting things. That there were arrangements with her brother. That they couldn't keep assessing an empty house as though it were still an ordinary rented home.’

Lena heard Ruben's voice: that was the intention. For Eva, that intention had justified changing something that had already happened.

‘You believed him?’

Eva turned her glasses in her fingers. ‘I wanted it finished. We'd been told those files had to be ready that week. Otherwise the project would get held up again over something administrative.’

‘What I saw wasn't an administrative problem.’

‘I understand that now.’

‘You understood what it said then. You took it out.’

Eva looked at her mug. Lena had not used the harsher word. She had only named an action, leaving less room to discuss procedures.

‘Yes,’ Eva said.

Something opened in Lena's chest, first like relief, then much sharper. She had expected a denial she would have to take apart. That single yes made it impossible to pretend they had both somehow missed the wrong version.

‘You cropped the photographs too.’

‘To fit them on the page.’

‘And left out the parts showing someone lived there.’

Eva picked up the teaspoon and put it on a coaster. ‘Niels said the pictures should only show the building itself. That personal belongings didn't belong in a vacancy assessment.’

‘It wasn't a vacancy assessment.’

‘No.’

Lena leant towards the original, saw her name and drew the sheet closer. The movement surprised her. It was paper, not a possession Eva could keep hold of. Still, she did not want it left on this desk among files attached, at someone else's request, to a different story.

‘When did you do it?’

‘Friday. The eighth of May. In the afternoon. That's when I made the new export.’

‘The initials?’

Eva nodded towards the folder on screen. ‘The cover sheet was from our earlier work. The layout was right already. Your details were in it.’

‘You had permission to use that for my report. Not this text.’

‘I thought I was finishing the same file.’

‘You put a different conclusion under my name.’

Eva said nothing. A car passed the practice. Its headlights swept the bottom of the window although it was not yet dark. Lena pressed her fingers flat against her paper until they stopped moving.

‘It already listed seven sets of keys on 8 May,’ she said. ‘The extra sets weren't made until afterwards.’

‘He gave me the number. I didn't see any keys.’

‘Why didn't he add it under his own name?’

Eva met her eyes. ‘Because then it wouldn't be a completed inspection file. He said it was just a difference of perspective. You were looking at the leak; they were looking at what had to happen before work could start.’

‘And that was enough for you.’

‘It was enough for me then.’

The slight shift in tense brought no comfort. Eva put on her glasses and opened a folder again. She searched for a message, scrolled and stopped at a line. She did not immediately turn the screen towards Lena.

‘I've still got the email. His request. The text came with it.’

‘Don't delete anything. Leave it where it is.’

‘I wasn't going to delete it.’

Lena wanted to ask what Eva had done all weekend with the opportunities she had had. She swallowed the question. Thinking about deletion was not proof anything had been removed. The emails still there mattered more than the accusation she wanted to make.

‘Who paid you?’

Eva moved her chair back. ‘I'm paid to assemble documents. You know that.’

‘Not by me to replace my findings.’

‘There was an extra fee. For additional work and getting it finished on time.’

‘From whom?’

‘Through Noordhuis. Niels said he could arrange it.’

She named a sum. Listening, Lena immediately pictured it on an invoice: one line for additional processing, a tidy description beneath which no one need see a kitchen in a home where someone still slept. For years she had paid Eva to make her work clear and orderly. Now that very skill had been sold to someone who wanted her observations obscured.

‘Has it been paid?’

‘Yes.’

‘You told me you hadn't changed the substance.’

‘I thought you'd sort it out as a coordination error. With Niels.’

‘You let me go to him without knowing what you'd done.’

‘I didn't want to burden you.’

Lena stood. She went to the window, not the door. It could not be opened. Below, an employee of the practice was freeing a bicycle from the rack. It took longer than expected; the front wheel was caught beneath a handlebar. Lena watched until it came loose.

‘Don't use that,’ she said. ‘Not wanting to burden me. My daughter was at home. That didn't give you the right to decide I'd cope better with a lie than a question.’

Eva said sorry, quietly and directly. It restored none of what Lena had already spent that week: working days, conversations with residents, the unquestioned right to point to her own initials.

‘I had jobs to finish,’ Eva said. ‘Niels kept ringing. Everyone was waiting for the file, he said. Otherwise they'd have to find someone else to handle it. I kept thinking there must be an agreement somewhere that wasn't mine to assess.’

‘You didn't have to assess the tenancy agreement. You had to leave my text alone.’

‘Yes.’

Lena turned. Eva's hands were below the edge of the desk. The two printouts still lay together. The story Eva had told herself fitted into one movement from one sheet to the other. Lena had to keep that story from becoming an account in which no one was responsible.

‘Have you heard anything about Henk?’

Eva looked up. ‘That he died. After you started asking questions. I don't know what happened.’

‘Neither do I.’

Lena sat down again. She said nothing about Sofie's call. Eva's admission concerned files and payment. She had no right to put another woman's fear into it to see whether Eva would say more.

‘I'll tell Anouk about this conversation,’ she said. ‘Not as your statement. As what I've heard you say tonight. She needs to speak to you herself.’

Eva nodded at the computer. ‘Shall I send it all to you?’

‘Not through me. Contact her yourself. Keep the original request, the attachment you received, your own files. Let someone establish which versions exist. I'm not going to sort anything out or save it again for you here.’

‘So you won't help me.’

‘I'll give you the contact details. I won't agree what your account is going to be.’

Eva moved her mug off the papers. ‘I need to talk to someone before I just hand this over.’

‘You can. Get your own advice. Don't use the time to make what's there disappear.’

Lena gave her Anouk's name and contact details. Eva wrote them on a pink sticky note. She looked at it, then took a separate sheet. She stuck the note to her screen and wrote the date and the folder holding the request on the sheet. Lena did not read over her shoulder.

‘I'll get in touch,’ Eva said. ‘I'll tell her I made the changes. And that the original emails are there.’

‘You don't have to promise me that settles it.’

‘I know.’

The hurt tone she had started with was gone. She opened her diary and wrote something against the following morning. Then she closed the documents on screen, leaving the computer running. Lena could not tell whether writing it down meant she would stand by the decision tomorrow. It was Eva's choice now and had to remain so.

Lena put away the printouts, the original first, the export on top. There was no familiar goodbye for this situation. Eva accompanied her to the door and asked whether their other joint jobs were going ahead.

‘Not now,’ Lena said. ‘I need to check my files. How we finished the earlier ones too. That doesn't mean I'm calling them all wrong without looking.’

‘I haven't done this on every job.’

‘Then the check needs to establish that.’

Lena paused beside the poster on the stairs. Her phone was in her bag's inside pocket. First she went outside and sat on the low wall beside the bicycle rack. Half past eight had come and gone. Jip need not wait up. She sent the promised message: finished talking, home soon. She told Tom their Tuesday arrangement still stood.

Then she made a note, brief enough to separate the words she had heard from her thoughts about them. Eva had replaced the text at Niels's request. She had received an additional fee. She said the original emails and files still existed. She would contact Anouk herself. Lena also recorded that Eva said she did not know what had happened to Henk.

She messaged Anouk: there was new information about the export, and Eva was willing to make contact. She would supply a fuller account of her own conversation as agreed. She would not forward mail from Eva's account. She would not add a conclusion about who had pushed someone to an account concerning a file.

At home she left her shoes in the hall. Jip had left a message about the school folder: just the thin one, I've got the thick one. Lena took the right folder from the sofa and put it by the front door. In the kitchen the PE bag still hung over a chair; it had not dried completely outside.

She laid her diary beside it. Sofie was alive. She had called herself and had not shared her address. Eva had finally admitted what she had done. More people could now speak directly, each with a different piece of what had happened. Lena still did not know about the evening at the back steps. She remained the surveyor who had let her own final version go unchecked.

She switched off the kitchen light and took no file upstairs.