Chapter 18

The office emptied out by seven.

It always did on Thursdays. Something about the end of the week approaching made people leave earlier – a collective loosening, like a building exhaling. By seven fifteen the last associate had gone, Noey had said goodnight to both of them with the cheerful efficiency of someone who had somewhere better to be, and Heng had left a note on Becky’s desk about the disclosure documents and gone home wherever Heng went when he wasn’t at his desk.

By seven thirty it was just the two of them.

This had become the rhythm of the week without either of them deciding it should be. Freen stayed because the mission required her close and because the firm at night was a different security landscape from the firm during the day and because she had a contingency argument to draft by morning. Becky stayed because the closing arguments were two and a half weeks away and because the work didn’t care what time it was.

These were the reasons.

They were both aware they were the reasons.

Freen was at her desk with the contingency argument open in front of her and the network diagram from lunch running underneath everything like background noise she couldn’t turn off. Jeff’s route from the side exit. The two men in the photographs. The four days’ advance notice on a hearing that wasn’t publicly listed. She wrote a sentence of the argument and thought about the timing and wrote another sentence and thought about the two and a half weeks and kept going.

Through the glass Becky was at her desk with her closing argument. She had been working on it in pieces since the trial began – Freen had seen the document open on her screen enough times to recognise it by its length and layout – but these last weeks she was working on it differently. More concentrated. Longer stretches without moving. The particular stillness of someone assembling something they had been building toward for a long time.

At eight forty-five Freen got up to get water from the kitchen.

She came back and sat down and looked at the contingency argument and looked at the window.

Bangkok at this hour was different from Bangkok in the day. The hard bright business of it softened into something more diffuse – the lights of other buildings, the glow of the streets below, the particular depth of a city sky that was never quite dark because there was always too much happening underneath it.

And above all of it, if you looked past the light pollution to where the sky was slightly less orange and slightly more itself, the stars.

Not many. The city took most of them. But some.

Freen looked at them for a moment. Then she looked back at her screen.

—

“What are you looking at.”

She hadn’t heard Becky’s office door open. She looked up. Becky was in the doorway with her coffee – the one Heng had brought at five that she was still working through. Her face had that sharp, evaluating quality Freen had seen a hundred times in the courtroom and in meetings, the one that measured everything and let nothing slide.

But underneath it, something else. Softer. Less decided.

“The sky,” Freen said.

Becky looked at the window. Then back at Freen. “There’s not much to see.”

“There’s enough.”

Becky leaned against the doorframe. She looked at the window again – at the orange-dark Bangkok sky and the office buildings and the suggestion of something above all of it. “You were looking at the stars.”

It wasn’t a question.

“What’s left of them,” Freen said. “The city takes most of them.”

Becky was quiet for a moment. “Do you know them. The stars.”

Freen looked at her.

“The names,” Becky said. “The patterns. Do you actually know them or is it just looking.”

It was a simple question. Curious. The kind you asked when you were genuinely interested and not performing interest. Freen had been in enough conversations to know the difference.

“I know them,” she said.

“Show me.”

—

She hadn’t meant to tell her as much as she did.

She started with what was visible – the few stars that made it through the light, which weren’t many but were enough if you knew where to look. She named them. Explained the patterns they belonged to. The city made it hard but not impossible and there was something in explaining it out loud, to someone who was actually listening, that made her say more than she had planned.

She told Becky about navigation. How it worked, how you used the sky when you had nothing else, what it felt like to be somewhere with no light pollution and have the whole of it above you.

She stopped herself when she realised she had said in the field without thinking about it.

Becky hadn’t moved.

She was sitting on the edge of Freen’s desk – she had crossed the office at some point during the explanation and sat down in the way that people sat down when they forgot they were supposed to stay where they were – with her coffee in both hands and her eyes on Freen. Not on the window. On Freen.

Her work was completely forgotten. Freen could see the closing argument document on her screen through the glass, cursor blinking, untouched.

The office was very quiet.

“In the field,” Becky said.

Not an accusation. Just the two words, repeated back quietly. The particular way she repeated things she wanted to examine.

Freen said nothing.

Becky looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at the window. At what was left of the stars through the orange glow of the city. She didn’t push. She never pushed immediately – Freen had learned this, the way she had learned most things about Becky, by watching carefully and paying attention.

She just sat with it.

“How many times,” Becky said eventually. “How many times have you navigated by them.”

A pause. “Enough that it’s automatic now.”

“Where.”

Freen looked at her. “Different places.”

Becky nodded. The slow nod of someone accepting an incomplete answer because they understand that complete isn’t available right now. She looked back at the stars. The orange glow had deepened slightly as the evening went on – the city leaning into its own light.

“There’s a pattern I can never find,” she said. “Orion. People always talk about it being obvious and I can never – I look and I just see individual stars.”

Freen turned to the window. “There.” She pointed. “The three in a line. That’s the belt. Once you have the belt you have the rest.”

Becky leaned slightly to follow the direction of her hand. Close enough that Freen could have turned her head and been – she looked at the window.

“The belt,” Becky said.

“The three stars. Straight line.”

A pause. “I think I see it.”

“You do.”

Becky was quiet. She was looking at the window and Freen was looking at the window and the city went about its night below them and the office held them both in its quiet.

“You’re not what I thought you were,” Becky said.

She said it quietly. Not to Freen exactly. More to the window, or to the thing she was looking at through it, or to whatever she was working out in her head. Like it had been sitting there for a while and had finally gotten heavy enough to put down.

Freen said nothing.

She thought about the right thing to say and couldn’t find it and so she said nothing and the silence that followed was – different from the office silences she had gotten used to. Not professional. Not the careful silence of two people maintaining appropriate distance. Something more honest than that. Something that neither of them was performing.

The most honest thing between them since day one.

Neither of them moved.

The city went about its business. Somewhere below a siren started up and faded. A light went on in the building opposite. The cursor on Becky’s screen blinked in the darkened office behind the glass.

After a while Becky slid off the edge of the desk and picked up her coffee and looked at Freen for a moment. The look was not the sharp, measuring one she wore in the courtroom. It was something that didn’t have a name yet, something still being decided.

Then she went back into her office.

The door stayed open.

—

They worked for another hour without speaking.

The silence was comfortable in a way that the earlier professional silence had never been. Freen didn’t try to analyse why. She drafted the contingency argument and got it to a point where it was good enough to review in the morning and closed the file. Becky worked on the closing argument and at some point she stopped and sat back in her chair and looked at what she had written.

At ten she came to her office door.

“Go home,” she said. “The argument will still be wrong tomorrow.”

Freen looked at her screen. “It’s not wrong. It’s incomplete.”

“Same thing at this hour.” Becky leaned on the door frame. She looked tired in the way she looked when she had been concentrating for a long time and had forgotten to stop. “The hearing tomorrow is at nine. I need you sharp.”

“I’m always sharp.”

“I know.” The hint of something at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. “It’s annoying.”

Freen shut her laptop. She picked up her bag and her jacket and stood. They walked out together – through the outer office, which was dim and quiet and felt very different at this hour, the desks empty and the screens dark and the whole space stripped back to its bones.

At the lift Becky pressed the button. Freen stood beside her.

“The belt,” Becky said. Looking at the lift doors. “Three stars. Straight line.”

“Three stars,” Freen said. “Straight line.”

The lift arrived. They stepped in. The doors closed and the building moved under them and neither of them said anything else on the way down.

Outside on the street they went in different directions.

Freen walked to her car. She sat in it for a moment before starting the engine. The city was doing what it always did at this hour – loud and lit and indifferent – and somewhere in one of the lit windows above her Becky’s office was dark now for the first time since this morning.

She thought about you’re not what I thought you were.

She thought about what a clear sky looked like in the field. She had told Becky that and she had not planned to and it had come out before she decided to say it and she was not sure what to do with that.

She started the engine.

She drove home. She made tea she didn’t drink. She stood at her own window and looked at the Bangkok sky and found Orion without trying – three stars in a straight line, the belt, and then the rest of it building outward the way it always did.

She thought about Becky leaning slightly to follow the direction of her hand.

She went to her desk. The photograph of Becky in court was on the corner where it had been since Tuesday. She looked at it for a moment.

She did not turn it face down.

For the third time.

She sat down and opened the contingency argument and worked on it until it was finished and then she went to bed and lay in the dark and thought about navigation and stars and the particular quality of a silence that was more honest than anything she had said out loud in six weeks.

She didn’t examine any of it.

She was almost convincing about it.

—

Across the city Becky sat in her own apartment with the closing argument open on her laptop and did not read it.

She thought about three stars in a straight line. About the way Freen had said in the field without appearing to notice she had said it. About the way she had looked at the window after – not as a deflection but as a choice, a deliberate not-looking that was different from the careful professional not-looking Freen did most of the time.

About you’re not what I thought you were and the silence that had followed it and the fact that the silence had felt like more of an answer than anything Freen had actually said.

She closed the laptop.

She stood at her own window for a while. The city was the city – the same view she had looked at for three years from this apartment, the same lights and noise and particular quality of Bangkok at night.

She found Orion.

Three stars. Straight line.

She stood there for a while longer than she needed to.

Then she went to bed. She lay in the dark and thought about the way Freen had said there’s enough when Becky said there wasn’t much to see. About the way she had pointed at the sky like it was something she knew, something she had lived inside, something that belonged to her.

About the photograph on Freen’s desk. The one she wasn’t supposed to have seen. The one she had definitely seen.

She closed her eyes.

You’re not what I thought you were.

She had meant it as much as she had said. She wasn’t sure Freen had heard more. She wasn’t sure she wanted Freen to hear more.

She wasn’t sure of anything except that she wasn’t going to sleep any time soon.

She didn’t examine any of it.

She was not convincing about it at all.