Gree did not answer, her hand fixed an inch above the square and her fingers curled loose and sure around the little animal, as they had been the year she carved it. Johan had built the shed and never got to use it for much else.
The kettle in the kitchen ticked as it cooled from its last boil, while somewhere on Kerkweg a car passed over wet tarmac, tires hissing up and then down and then gone. The room settled back into the specific stillness a house keeps when it thinks nothing is about to happen in it. Without meaning to, Loes noticed that the lamp's reflection in the varnished tabletop had not shifted during the time her mother held one breath. It was still an ordinary fact she had no reason yet to read differently.
"Mum, you're doing the thing." Marijke's smile had the shape of a joke she'd told before and expected to land the same way it always landed. "The dramatic thing. You've made your point."
A nearly empty service station slid floodlit past on the right, built for people driving somewhere they had not fully chosen at an hour nobody sane would select voluntarily. For a moment, she imagined pulling in and switching off the engine. She could sit in the dry dark with a bad coffee and let the six-week clock expire on its own; for once, the book could decide without her hand on it.
She pictured the stop in specific, almost domestic detail: the vending machine's dim fluorescent light and a paper cup too hot to hold properly. Most vivid was the particular relief of being, for one unallocated hour, a woman with nowhere she was required to be. She did not pull in. The exit came and went, a green sign swallowed by the rain in her mirror, while she kept driving and did not examine that either.
"Coen, slow down, there's standing water past the next bend, I can see it from here—" Marijke's voice sharpened. Faintly through the speaker, Loes heard the specific hiss of a car finding surface water at speed, and both of them held their breath for half a second. Coen's voice came back, admirably level: "Got it, we're fine, I saw it too." Marijke exhaled into the phone. The sound told Loes exactly how not-fine her sister had believed they might be for that half-second.
"Everyone slow down," Loes said, into the sudden quiet after that, the first thing she'd offered the call in twenty minutes. "All three cars. I mean it."
At twelve, everything about her relationship to this book had changed shape in a kitchen that still had the old wallpaper, green and gold and peeling gently at one corner behind the radiator. Whenever the radiator woke, it smelled of warm dust, and its draft lifted the loose wallpaper corner without ever peeling it free. Her school uniform was still on because nobody had told her to change before the Game started. Chalk dust from that afternoon's board remained faintly on one cuff, where she'd leaned on the tray during a geography test she would later fail by exactly two marks.
The kitchen light back then had a particular yellow cast; Johan had never replaced the bulb with anything stronger before he died, and in all the years after, Gree never replaced it either, because changing it might have admitted, quietly, that the kitchen was hers alone to furnish now.
The dispute that evening had been over a scoring square nobody could agree on, with three adults arguing three versions of the same memory. Each believed themselves the only reliable witness to their own childhood, and argued with the specific, escalating confidence that belief grants. Marijke, fourteen, had one version; an uncle since moved abroad and mostly written out of the family's working memory had another. Gree sat at the head of the table with her arms folded and let the argument run, as she let most arguments pass the point where other parents would have ended them. More than once in those years, Gree said that a family unable to argue in front of each other was a family lying in private instead.
"It was three points the year I invented the square," the uncle said, for the third time, as though repetition were itself a form of evidence. "I would know. I named it."
Another pause, longer this time. Behind it, faintly, the sound of a kitchen that was not this kitchen: a tap running somewhere, a chair scraping, Fenna's voice pitched high and indistinct in another room, present and unbothered by whatever was happening on this end of the call. Loes pictured it without meaning to, the shape of a kitchen she'd visited perhaps a dozen times in nine years. Priya's handwriting marked a calendar by the fridge, and a child's drawing was taped somewhere at exactly a nine-year-old's eye level. The picture did nothing to make the silence on her own end of the line any easier to sit inside.
"You don't get to say that to me." His voice had dropped, not louder, quieter: the specific quiet of a man closing a door softly. Slamming it would give away more than he wanted to give away. "You weren't there for most of it. You came when the book made you come."
At his end, the tap kept running, a thin domestic noise beneath the accusation.
The rulebook's business, across all four seasons, stayed almost entirely hers, and three minor squares whose old wording had grown genuinely confusing with age got updated under her hand. She worked each revision through twice before committing it to ink, the way she'd learned to from watching thirty years of other hands do it less carefully. A dispute over whether a piece knocked to the floor by a cat that did not, strictly, belong to anyone in the family counted as a legal move interrupted also came to her for judgment.
The cat itself belonged to nobody in particular, a marmalade tom that had adopted the whole street. It had the specific confidence of an animal that knew exactly how many doors would open for it if it simply waited long enough outside the right one. It came in through the kitchen door Coen had propped for air. With the unhurried entitlement of ownership, it walked the length of the table and knocked Nienke's piece to the floor with one indifferent paw. It did not pause to register that it had done anything at all.
"That's a legal move," Coen said, already reaching for the rulebook before anyone else could claim the joke as their own. "The cat gets a turn. I want that on the record."
Marijke had written an agenda. An actual agenda, on actual paper, three items numbered in her own decisive hand and set at the center of the table where the board usually went. Looking at it, Loes understood that her sister only wrote agendas for things that frightened her badly enough to need managing on paper first.
The board still lay unrolled at its usual end of the table, Gree's painted hare frozen on the square her hand had last touched. Marijke had cleared only the free half for the agenda, so the paper sat where the board usually claimed the centre. Its retreat from the middle took Loes a full minute to place. In thirty-two years of gatherings here, this was the first convened for a family meeting rather than a family game. Nothing showed the difference so clearly as an agenda sitting where the pieces usually began.
Coen had put the kettle on twice already and abandoned it twice, and the water had gone from hot to merely warm in the pot nobody had poured from yet. Nienke sat with her coat still on, ready to leave the moment the conversation stopped being useful to her.
"Item one," Marijke said, to a table that already knew what item one was going to be. "The wedding date."
Sander had not answered, and by the third meeting everyone at the table had abandoned the pretense that he might. The empty chair at his old place said more than any of them could currently tolerate: eight months to convince him. Seven now, and counting, and nobody had managed so much as a reply to the message Nienke swore she'd sent herself, personally, the week after the loophole was announced. She'd shown Loes the message once, unprompted, on her phone, and two careful paragraphs asked nothing more than that he read them. Beneath them, the single grey tick had never once, in three weeks, turned blue.
Rain had started somewhere past six and continued without interruption, and its ticking against the dark dining-room window made everyone at the table speak a half-register louder than necessary, without noticing the adjustment. At the table's far end, the board still lay unrolled where it always did now; the hare remained exactly where it had been for exactly fourteen months. Fenna had claimed the nearest chair with a fistful of crayons and the absorbed concentration of a child who no longer expected the adult half of the table to include her in whatever it was actually discussing.
Tea had gone cold in front of everyone at roughly the same rate, and nobody was thirsty enough to reboil it. The kettle sat dark and unused on the counter, as it did on evenings when this family least wanted to admit how hard a conversation had gotten.
A thin skin had formed on the tea; each shift of a cup made a damp ceramic click against the wood, loud in the gaps between voices.
Rainwater gathered beneath the chairs in irregular crescents, and wet wool and cooled tea gave the room the unmistakable atmosphere of a meeting everyone had attended willingly and already regretted.
"Maybe he doesn't need to actively agree," Marijke said, into the silence that had settled over the table once everyone had run out of other business to discuss first. "Maybe silence counts as consent, if we wait long enough."
"It doesn't," Loes said. "I already checked. Silence is silence. Consensus means every living Keeper-recognized adult agreeing to it. Not failing to object. Agreeing."
"Then someone needs to actually go talk to him. Properly. Not a text."
"There was a wedding before you quit too. They still called you every five minutes back then. Now you're not the Keeper anymore and it's gone completely quiet." Saar's voice had none of the softening an adult might have reached for automatically, the particular directness of a person young enough to still believe the truth is a kindness rather than a risk. "You wanted them to call. They didn't. Are you surprised?"
Loes opened her mouth to answer, and for the first time in this conversation, in this entire month, she had no ready sentence. No ruling, precedent, or heading stood within reach.
She sat with her daughter's question in the silence it had earned, and the kitchen clock ticked through enough time for Saar to look briefly sorry she had asked so plainly. She did not take it back.
Outside, a car passed on the wet road, and its tires hissed as tires had past this kitchen window on a hundred ordinary evenings. Neither of them reached to switch on another light, fill the kettle, or perform any of the small, practiced acts this family gave its hands. The silence continued longer than either knew how to end.
He came without calling first, which by itself told Loes this wasn't a social visit. Sander had not appeared that way since Saar was a toddler; even then, he'd come only twice, both times because a car wouldn't start somewhere between here and Kerkweg.
After eight, the doorbell interrupted the house's customary quiet: Saar upstairs among revision cards, the kettle cold beside tea Loes had abandoned unfinished two hours earlier. The cup had developed the thin surface film that marked how thoroughly she had forgotten it. She heard the car before the bell, its engine stopping too abruptly outside a house it clearly hadn't visited often enough to know where to park. Its abrupt silence made the settled house feel briefly occupied by somebody else's decision. Before the second ring, she was already moving toward the door; some old reflex had answered before the rest of her caught up to the unfamiliar engine outside her own front step. Her hand reached the latch before she'd fully identified the car as his.
She opened the door and read the whole conversation in his face before he said a word. The particular tension around his jaw meant he'd rehearsed something during the drive, then doubted every version between the motorway and her doorstep. He'd parked badly, one wheel half up the curb, an uncharacteristic lapse in a man who kept his car as carefully ordered as everything else about him. The visible disorder told her more than his improvised greeting could have, and usually he corrected such imprecision before anyone could observe it; tonight he had left the evidence visible.
"Of course," she said, stepping back to let him pass; he entered quickly, avoiding sustained eye contact, and reached the kitchen before she'd shut the door behind them.
He didn't sit, planting both hands flat on the island as a brace rather than a prelude to settling in, and without preamble, he asked a perfunctory question about the wedding preparations. It was so irrelevant to whatever had driven him here that Loes let the silence run past courtesy; its attempted casualness only exposed the distance from his actual purpose.
"Marijke called, furious, to say you'd left the book on the table and walked out, and nobody's touched it since."
He paused, then pushed on: "Now the consensus thing's stuck because there's no Keeper to record anyone's agreement even if I said yes, which—" He stopped and started again. "I'm not saying I would."
The dust in the shaft of window light seemed to thicken rather than settle as she worked, disturbed by every drawer; somewhere below, she heard a car pull onto the gravel. She did not yet recognize it as her sister's.
Marijke arrived a little after two and let herself in as Loes had; she found her sister on the spare-room floor, surrounded by open boxes. A scarf Loes couldn't remember Gree ever wearing lay across her knees.
"Coen said you'd driven down," Marijke said, from the doorway, not committing to entering yet. "I wasn't going to come. I told myself I wasn't going to come, actually, three separate times this morning."
"Here I am." Marijke looked at the boxes, the half-sorted piles, and her sister sitting on a floor she hadn't sat on since childhood. Then she came in and closed the door against a draft neither had mentioned, though both had noticed it.
For a moment, Marijke looked ready to reach for a notebook of her own; the practical, list-making instinct ran through her like a second spine. Instead, she visibly decided to sit on the floor without a plan; it cost her something Loes recognized and did not comment on.
Marijke's hands hovered once over empty air before settling on her knees; Loes recognized the effort because her own hands reached for kettles under the same conditions.
"I'm not here to talk about Sander. Or the wedding. Or any of it. I just didn't think you should be doing this alone."
