SONJA AND I ARE IN AMSTELVEEN MALL WHEN MY PHONE RINGS.

“Wim has been arrested based on statements made by Ros,” I hear someone say.

The impact of the message was so huge that I can’t remember who called and what else this person said. I just remember, “Wim has been arrested.”

Finally!

  

Since my last meeting, on November 27, 2014, we haven’t heard from the Justice Department and I have lost hope that he’d ever be arrested.

But now what?

Are they going to use our statements and—more important—does he know yet that we’ve testified against him?

By the time Michelle calls, we are feeling very tense and insecure. CIU wants a meeting on December 17 to discuss if they could use our statements.

This is the moment for us to decide. Are we going to testify against him publicly? If we decide to do it, we can’t go back to how things were.

  

Now that it’s all so real, I start doubting. I wonder if I can do this to him: no more prospects of freedom. Getting old and dying within the confines of prison walls. Alone, without family and friends.

I decide to ask my therapist for advice.

“You must be crazy,” she says. “Why would you do that, testify? You’re messing up your whole life! Everything you’ve worked so hard for. You shouldn’t do it. You couldn’t live with yourself if you did.” That last remark hit me right in the heart; I don’t know if I can live with myself if I convict my brother for life.

At the last moment, I call off the meeting. I’m in doubt. Almost two years I’ve been waiting for this moment, and now I’m not sure.

That afternoon I tell my best friend—who has been a witness to my life for twenty years—what my therapist has said and that I therefore had called off my meeting with Betty.

“That woman is out of her mind,” he says. “She doesn’t get it, the misery you’ve lived with for so many years. Easy for her to say. I’m not saying that you should or shouldn’t—that’s your call. But I know your life, I’ve seen it up close, and your life sucks, big-time. It couldn’t be any worse. And if you feel guilty about what you’ll do to him, just listen to the tapes every now and then. Then you’ll know exactly why you did it.”