Chapter 9

It started as observation.

Everything started as observation. That was how Freen worked — watch first, understand the pattern, then act. It was how she approached every new environment and every new person and it had served her well for eight years in situations considerably more complicated than a law firm.

So she watched.

Day one. Becky arrived at seven fifty-eight. She came through the glass partition door already moving, bag on one shoulder, phone in hand or at her ear, eyes already on her office. She had a coffee. It came from outside — not the office kitchen, which produced something technically describable as coffee but which Freen had tasted on her first day and not repeated. This coffee came in a cup from somewhere specific. White cup, dark lid, a small logo Freen couldn’t read from her desk.

She noted it.

Day two. Same cup. Same logo. Becky set it on the corner of her desk when she arrived and it sat there through the morning, occasionally picked up and set back down without Becky seeming to notice she was doing it. By eleven it was empty. By eleven fifteen Becky was slightly sharper with everyone she spoke to, which Freen also noted.

She looked up the logo on her phone during lunch. A small cafe two streets over. Family run. Open from six.

She noted that too.

Day three. She walked past the cafe on her way in. Looked through the window. Watched the morning rush for four minutes. Identified which of the three people behind the counter Becky’s order would go to — the older woman on the left, the one who moved with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for twenty years and had memorised the regulars.

She went in.

She described what she was looking for without using Becky’s name. The woman behind the counter looked at her for a moment. Then she said: *medium Americano, oat milk, no sugar, extra shot on Mondays and Thursdays.*

Freen thanked her and ordered the same for herself.

It was good coffee. She could see why.

Day four. She arrived at six fifty. The cafe was quiet. She ordered Becky’s coffee and carried it the two streets back and took the lift to the fourteenth floor and set it on the corner of Becky’s desk where it always sat.

Then she went to her own desk and opened the Viroj bundle and started reading.

She did not look at the office door.

She was reading a section on documentary hearsay — which she understood approximately thirty percent of but was working on — when she heard the lift. Seven fifty-six. Two minutes early. She kept her eyes on the document.

The glass door. The footsteps she recognised without looking up. The particular rhythm of them. Becky moved differently from everyone else in the office — not faster, just more deliberate, like each step was going somewhere specific.

The footsteps stopped.

Freen turned a page.

The silence lasted about four seconds. Then: “Sarocha.”

She looked up.

Becky was standing in the doorway of her office. She hadn’t gone in yet. She was holding the coffee cup and looking at Freen with the expression that was difficult to read — the careful one, the one that took things apart quietly and put them back together before it showed anything.

“How did you know,” Becky said.

It wasn’t quite a question.

Freen looked at her. “Know what.”

A pause. Becky looked at the cup in her hand. Then back at Freen. The expression shifted very slightly — something that wasn’t quite an answer and wasn’t quite a question either.

Freen said nothing.

Another pause. Becky looked at the cup again. She took a sip. Set it back on the corner of her desk, in the exact spot it always sat. Like it had always been there.

The silence stretched.

“Don’t make it a habit,” Becky said.

She went into her office.

The door didn’t close all the way.

Freen looked back at her document. The section on documentary hearsay. She read the same sentence she had been reading when Becky arrived and this time it went in on the first pass which was an improvement.

She turned the page.

She was going to make it a habit.

Becky’s POV:

Becky noticed it the moment she walked in.

She noticed most things. It was the quality she found most useful in herself professionally and most inconvenient personally — the inability to not see things. Details presented themselves whether she wanted them to or not. The coffee cup on the corner of her desk, sitting exactly where she always put it, was there before she had taken three steps into her office.

She stopped.

She looked at it.

It was her order. She knew without picking it up — the size of the cup, the logo, the way the lid sat. She had been going to that cafe for two years. She knew what her order looked like.

She picked it up and turned around.

Freen was at her desk in the outer office. Reading. The same focused stillness she brought to everything, like the world around her was optional information. She was not looking at Becky.

Becky looked at her for a moment.

Three days. Freen had been here for three days. Becky had not told her where she got her coffee. Had not mentioned the cafe. Had not, as far as she could recall, done anything that would have communicated her order to someone who was paying ordinary levels of attention.

Freen did not pay ordinary levels of attention.

Becky had been aware of this since the first day. The way she positioned herself. The way she always knew who was entering the room. The way she had, without being asked and without making anything of it, placed herself between Becky and the door during the client meeting on Wednesday. Small things. Things that didn’t fit the category of junior associate settling into a new firm.

Things she had been filing away.

And now coffee. Her exact order, from her exact cafe, on the corner of her desk before she arrived.

She said Freen’s name.

Freen looked up. Her expression was open. Unhurried. The expression of someone who had nothing to explain and knew it.

How did you know.

She said nothing.

Becky looked at the cup. Then at Freen. Then at the cup again. She took a sip — because it was her coffee and it was good and she was not going to let whatever this was get between her and a good coffee at seven fifty-six in the morning.

It was perfect. Of course it was.

The silence between them stretched and Freen just sat there in it, not filling it, not explaining herself, not performing innocence or guilt or anything else. Just sitting. Looking back at Becky with that steady look that Becky could not quite categorise.

Don’t make it a habit, she said.

She went into her office.

She sat down at her desk and opened her notebook to the page she had been on yesterday and looked at the words without reading them.

She thought about the positioning in the client meeting. The way Freen had read the entire evidence bundle in one night. The military names in the procurement chain that she had been turning over in her head for a week. The way Freen had said I’ve been in rooms under considerably more pressure than a courtroom like it was nothing.

The coffee on the corner of her desk.

She picked up her pen.

She was going to ask Charlotte about this. Not today. She needed more first. She needed the picture to be clearer before she said anything because Charlotte would deflect and Becky wanted to be sure enough that deflection wasn’t an option.

She turned to a fresh page.

She wrote one line at the top.

Who is she really.

Then she put the pen down and picked up the coffee and went back to work.

Outside through the glass Freen was reading. Turning pages. Completely undisturbed.

Becky watched her for three seconds.

Then she looked back at her own work.