Honni van Rijswijk is a lawyer, academic and fiction writer. Her short stories have been a finalist in the Zoetrope Short Story Contest and longlisted in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and she has been published in the literary journal Southerly. She is the recipient of a Varuna Writing Fellowship, and her short story “The Magpie Season” was shortlisted in the 2025 Hope Prize. Her debut novel, BREEDER (Blackstone Publishing, 2021), was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards (2022). She holds a BA/LLB (Hons) from the University of Sydney, an LLM from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from the University of Washington. Honni is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, where her research centres on law and literature. She lives in Sydney with her partner and child.
The Minutes
By Honni van Rijswijk
We had been reading true crime for eleven months before we did anything about Deb, and even then we did not call it that, not to each other and not in the minutes, which I kept in a red exercise book because Carol said a shared document could be subpoenaed and none of us was sure if she was joking.
The book club began, as these things do, with a case none of us had any connection to at all. Marion suggested the Claremont killings because she had read the trial coverage obsessively during lockdown and wanted, she said, to talk to people who would not tell her she was morbid. We met on the second Thursday of the month in Wendy’s sunroom, which overlooked the reserve and the pond where the herons stood so still in the reeds that visitors sometimes mistook them for ornaments, and we drank the kind of wine you buy in a box because none of us wanted to spend real money on a hobby that made our husbands raise their eyebrows. There were six of us then. Marion, Wendy, Carol, Netta, Deb, and me, though I should say I am the one telling this, so you will have to trust that I have not made myself better than I was.
We read the well-known ones first. The ones with podcasts and documentaries and a settled shape, where you could discuss the forensic odontology or the cadaver dogs without feeling that you were doing anything except being curious, in the way that women are permitted to be curious about violence as long as they perform enough distress about it afterward. Netta always cried a little at the end of a meeting, not because the case had moved her particularly but because she thought it was expected, and I understood this because I did something similar with my face, arranging it into concern the way you arrange a scarf.
Deb had joined in the third month, brought by Wendy, who worked with her at the medical centre and thought she needed friends who were not her husband’s friends. I want to be precise about this, because precision was the whole point of the club, the entire reason it existed, so far as I understood the reason: we liked cases that could be solved by looking closely enough at what was already there. Deb arrived already looked at. You could see it if you knew what you were looking for, though for a long time none of us did, not because we were unintelligent but because we had been trained, all of us, over decades, not to look at the ordinary version of the thing we spent our Thursday nights examining in its extraordinary form.
She wore long sleeves in December. She checked her phone with a particular flinching motion, the way you check for weather that might ruin a picnic. She laughed at things that were not funny, a laugh with no bottom to it, and left our meetings at nine fifteen exactly, never nine sixteen, because Aaron did not like her out past nine thirty and the walk to the car took fifteen minutes if she did not stop to talk, which she never did after the first few months.
We noticed. This is the part I want to be honest about, because it would be simpler to say we did not notice, that we were naive women drinking cask wine and discussing dead strangers while our friend was being slowly disassembled a suburb away, and there would be a kind of absolution in that, in having been merely blind. But we were not blind. Marion said something to me once, in the car park, about how Aaron always knew what time Deb had left, to the minute, as if he had a private line into Wendy’s sunroom. Carol mentioned that Deb’s meals had become smaller, and stranger, some private austerity we didn’t understand, cottage cheese and dry crackers eaten with the particular joylessness of a penance. Netta had seen the bruise on her wrist in April and asked about it, lightly, the way you ask about a bruise you already suspect the answer to, and Deb had said she’d walked into the pantry door, and Netta had said nothing further, because saying something further seemed, at the time, like an accusation against a door.
I want to tell you what changed it, though I am aware that in true crime there is always a pivot point, a single Tuesday when everything becomes clear, and real life is rarely so obliging. But there was, in fact, a Tuesday. Deb came to book club with a fractured finger, splinted with a tongue depressor and micropore tape from the medical centre where she worked, and she told us, before any of us asked, that she’d caught it in the car door, and something in the sentence’s construction, the way it arrived fully formed and slightly too fast, the way none of us had asked her yet, made the sunroom go very quiet, the kind of quiet that has a texture to it, like the pause after a chord that has not resolved.
Wendy poured more wine. Marion asked, gently, whether Deb wanted to talk about anything other than the book, which that month was a slim volume about a woman in regional Victoria who had killed her husband with an axe after nineteen years of what the prosecution called, with a flatness I found obscene, ‘a difficult relationship’, and what the defence, more usefully, called ‘coercive control’, though the term was newer then and the jury did not entirely know what to do with it. Deb said she was fine. She said it in the voice we all recognised, by then, as the voice reserved for saying she was fine, distinct from her ordinary voice, which we almost never heard any more.
It was Netta who said, once Deb had left at nine fifteen exactly, that she thought Aaron would kill her eventually, and she said it without drama, in the same tone she used to observe that a defendant’s alibi had a hole in it, and none of us contradicted her, because we did not believe she was wrong.
I will not pretend that what we did next was a plan formed in one evening. It accumulated the way our reading list accumulated, one case leading logically to the next, until by the ninth month we had read four books specifically about coercive control and its endings, the ones where the woman died and the ones, rarer, where she did not, and we had begun, without ever naming the exercise, to catalogue what separated the two outcomes. Distance from support. Financial independence. A witness willing to testify to a pattern rather than an incident, because the law, we had all learned by then, understood incidents far better than it understood patterns, understood a bruise far better than it understood a marriage constructed, brick by brick, into a cell.
We were, all of us, aware that Deb would not leave. Wendy had offered a room in her house, twice, and Deb had declined both times with an anxiety so acute it frightened us more than Aaron did, because it told us how thoroughly the leash had been internalised, how far past the collar the training had gone. Carol, who was a solicitor, told us plainly, one Thursday, that an intervention order was a piece of paper, and that pieces of paper had not saved the woman in the second-last book we read, whose ex-husband had breached his order fourteen times before the fifteenth, which was fatal.
I am not going to describe, in this account, precisely what we did to Aaron, because I do not think the mechanics are the interesting part, and because Carol, ever the solicitor, made us promise, long before there was anything to promise about, that certain details would never exist outside the six of us, not in a red exercise book, not in a story, not anywhere a mechanism could be reconstructed from a sequence of sentences. I will say that it happened on a Thursday, at the reserve by the pond, where Aaron sometimes met Deb because he did not trust her to drive herself home from book club and preferred, he said, to walk her the last stretch himself, a habit we had all thought, for months, was merely controlling, and which turned out, that night, to be exactly the vulnerability the case required. I will say that the herons did not move, even then, and that afterward the water closed over the surface with an ordinariness that seemed, to me, the single most frightening detail of the entire evening, more frightening than anything that had happened before it, because it demonstrated so completely how little the physical world cared about the moral one.
We did not discuss it, afterward, the way we discussed the books. We discussed the books forensically, dissecting motive and method with the pleasure of people handling something at a safe distance, but there was no distance available for what we had done, and so instead we simply resumed. The next Thursday we met in Wendy’s sunroom as usual, and Deb was there, because whatever grief she was entitled to feel and did feel, in her own private register, she had also, unmistakably, over the following weeks, begun to eat properly again, and to wear short sleeves in a season that permitted them, and to stay past nine fifteen without checking her phone, and none of us commented on any of this, because commenting on it would have required naming what had changed, and naming it was the one thing we had agreed, at the pond, without any of us saying so aloud, never to do.
The investigation, such as it was, treated Aaron’s disappearance as a man leaving his marriage in the manner men sometimes do, badly and without warning, and Deb, coached gently by Carol on the precise register of bewilderment that would read as authentic rather than performed, was interviewed twice and never again. I do not know if the detective believed her. I have read enough of these cases, by now, to understand that detectives frequently do not believe the bewildered wife, and proceed regardless, because belief is not evidentiary, and there was, in the end, no body, no complaint, no witness, nothing but a pond that kept its own accounts and a group of women whose only visible crime was reading too much about other people’s.
We are twelve now. The club grew, in the years afterward, the way reputations do among women who recognise each other by a certain quality of attention, a way of listening that has learned to hear the sentence beneath the sentence. I will not say how many of the new members joined us because of what we knew about them, or because of what we had begun to be capable of knowing, but I will say that Wendy’s sunroom is too small for us now, and we meet in the community hall, and the minutes are typed, on a laptop, because Carol says the risk calculus has changed, though she will not explain to me exactly how, and I have learned, in this particular society, not to ask questions whose answers I would then be required to carry.
Deb still comes. She has remarried, to a man who is, by every account we have gathered, ordinary in the specific way that used to seem like a low bar and now seems like the entire architecture of a decent life. She leads the discussion sometimes, when the case involves financial coercion, because she has a way of explaining how the money gets taken, slowly, that makes newer members go quiet in the way we all went quiet, once, listening to her explain a fractured finger.
We read a book last month about a woman who killed her husband in a country town and was convicted, because the jury did not believe, back then, that a woman could kill slowly, over years, before she ever picked up the weapon, and Netta said, in the tone she uses for these observations, that the woman would not have been convicted today, and Marion said she wasn’t sure about that, and Carol said the law had improved but not enough, and I said nothing, because I was watching Deb, who was looking at the pond through Wendy’s window, at the herons, who do not move, who have never moved, who stand in the reeds with the patience of something that has already worked out how the story ends and is simply waiting, with immense and terrible calm, for the rest of us to catch up.
I keep the minutes still. Not the early ones, the ones in the red exercise book, which I burned the week after the pond, in the kind of small domestic fire that a woman can light in a backyard without anyone asking questions, because women burn things in backyards all the time, leaves and old letters and the particular kind of paper that holds a shape until it doesn’t. But the later ones, the ordinary record of an ordinary book club, twelve women and a rotating list of cases, filed neatly in case anyone should ever ask what we discuss on Thursday nights, in Wendy’s sunroom, or in the hall, with our boxed wine and our careful attention and our long, patient, communal memory for exactly what a man like Aaron sounds like before anyone else has noticed he is speaking at all.
The Galway Review 