Chapter 6 – Her Name

Simon went back to the record that night, alone, from home.

He told himself it was diligence.

Katrin was in Basel. The flat was quiet in the way it only was when he was the one who had stayed.

He opened the case again.

Weber, Anna. 43.

He had seen the name before. It took him a day to work out where, and when he did, he wished he hadn’t.

The April sample. Forty cases. A row near the bottom.

He had signed it.

He sat with that for a while.

Then he did the thing he had spent the meeting not doing. He stopped reading the case as a routing decision and started reading it as a case.

Young for the profile. An atypical presentation — the kind of file that didn’t look like the files around it. A treatment pathway that wasn’t the standard one, which meant a cost the model flagged as high. And a confidence score that sat just above the line.

Four features.

He knew the four features.

He had heard them in a conference room in January, in Marek’s flat voice, over a slide they had deleted.

Young age. Unusual treatment history. High expected cost. Low confidence, just above threshold.

Segment X.

Anna Weber was a Segment X case.

She was the case Marek had been describing before there was anyone to describe.

Simon sat very still.

The system had done what it was built to do. It had looked at a case that didn’t fit the pattern, decided the pattern held anyway, and routed her to the pathway where no one looked twice.

No human review. Because they had raised the threshold. Because he had recommended raising the threshold. Because on average it was better — and it was better, the numbers were still better — and none of that was any use to Anna Weber, 43, whose file he had signed in a sample of forty in April and closed with forty green flags.

He thought, absurdly, of the yellow dot on the bathroom mirror.

Katrin marked the things she wanted to look at again in better light. Joints. Transitions. The places other people didn’t notice.

No one had looked at Anna’s case again in better light.

The light had been fine. The light had been green.

· · ·

Eva Weber agreed to meet him because he lied.

Not a large lie. He said he was from the insurer and wanted to understand what had happened. Both true. He let her believe it was official.

They met in a café near the hospital, which he understood, too late, was a cruelty he hadn’t intended.

Eva was younger than her sister. Practical-looking, the way people become practical when someone else has stopped being able to be.

She didn’t offer her hand.

“You’re the one who called.”

“Yes.”

“You said you wanted to understand.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. You want to find out how much I know.”

Simon didn’t argue.

That, he was learning, was faster.

Eva ordered a coffee she didn’t drink.

“Ask your questions.”

He didn’t have questions. He had a signature. He had four features and a green flag. He had come here for something he couldn’t have named in the room with Legal and could barely name now: he wanted the number to have a face, because he already knew what the number was, and he needed to know what it had cost.

So he asked the only true thing he had.

“Tell me about her.”

Eva looked at him for a long moment.

“She was a teacher. Primary school. Twenty years. She was better organised than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Organised.”

“She kept a record of everything. Every phone call. The date, the name of whoever she spoke to, what they told her.” Eva’s voice didn’t rise. That was somehow worse. “She had a notebook. She thought that if she was careful enough, if she wrote it all down and did everything right, the system would work. That’s what she said. The system will work if you do your part.”

Simon said nothing.

“She did her part,” Eva said. “She always got the letter. The letters always said the right things. Everything was in order. Everything was in order right up until it wasn’t, and then no one could tell me which part of it went wrong, because every single piece of it was correct.”

She looked at him.

“You’d know about that. Correct.”

Simon felt the sentence land somewhere it would stay.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“People keep saying that. It’s the one thing everyone’s allowed to say.”

She stood.

“I have to go.”

“Ms Weber—”

“If you want to understand what happened,” she said, “start with the fact that a person can do everything right and still end up in a room where no one will look at them.”

She left the coffee on the table, untouched.

Simon sat with it going cold in front of him.

Anna Weber had kept a notebook.

She had believed the system would work if she did her part.

He had built the part of the system that decided who was worth a second look.

· · ·

He walked back along the river.

It was July. The light stayed long over the water, the way it had in March, when everything was green and nothing was settled.

He had called it a signal.

In a room, over a deleted slide, he had said the word himself. We treat it for what it is. A signal.

He had been right about the word. That was the terrible part. It had been a signal.

He just hadn’t known it would have a name.