Chapter 14

It happened on a Wednesday afternoon over a file neither of them particularly needed.

The office was in its post-lunch quiet — that specific hour between two and three where the morning’s urgency had settled and the afternoon’s hadn’t quite built yet. Noey was at her desk eating something from a container and reading something on her screen that was probably not work related. The associates along the far wall were working steadily. Heng was on a call around the corner, his voice low and occasional.

Becky had come out of her office for the first time since morning.

This happened sometimes — she would surface from whatever she was working on and move through the outer office with the specific purpose of someone who had realised they needed something and come to get it. She moved to the filing cabinet along the left wall. The one that held the physical copies of the Viroj evidence bundle, the originals of documents that existed digitally but that Becky preferred to have in hand when she was working through arguments.

Freen had been at the filing cabinet for the past ten minutes.

Not because she needed to be. She had been reorganising her own section of the files — something she did when she needed to think, the physical act of ordering things helping her brain order other things simultaneously. She had been thinking about the second phone on Khun Malee’s desk. About the intercepted communication. About the three weeks that kept getting shorter.

She had her hand on the third drawer when Becky appeared beside her.

Neither of them registered it immediately. Becky reached for the same drawer — the third one, where the primary evidence documents lived — and Freen was already reaching and their hands arrived at the handle at the same moment.

A breath apart.

Less than a breath.

The cold metal of the drawer handle was between them and their hands were on either side of it and the distance that remained was something that could be measured in millimetres and probably shouldn’t be measured at all because measuring it would require acknowledging it and neither of them was doing that yet.

They both stopped.

Not quickly. That was the thing. A quick stop would have been instinctive — the reflex of almost touching something you didn’t expect, the automatic pull-back. This was not that. This was slow. Careful. The way you moved when you became suddenly aware of something and the awareness changed how you were moving before you had decided to change it.

Freen’s hand was very still.

Becky’s hand was very still.

The drawer handle sat between them and the afternoon light came through the office windows at the angle it came through at this hour and the sounds of the office continued around them — Noey’s container, Heng’s voice on the phone, the ambient hum of a building full of working people — and none of it was relevant to the two or three seconds that were happening at the filing cabinet.

Then Becky said: “Go ahead.”

Her voice was completely normal. The same voice she used for everything — even, professional, giving nothing away. She stepped back slightly and her hand dropped to her side and she looked at the cabinet rather than at Freen.

Freen took the file.

Her voice, had she used it, would also have been completely normal. She was certain of this. She was very good at completely normal.

She took the file and stepped back and Becky moved in to the cabinet and found what she needed and they moved apart with the naturalness of two colleagues who had reached for the same thing at the same time, which happened in offices constantly and meant nothing.

Their eyes didn’t meet.

—

Becky went back to her office.

She set the document she had retrieved on her desk and sat down and opened it to the relevant page and began reading. This was straightforward. She had been reading this document in her head since this morning and the physical version was just confirmation of what she already knew was there.

She read the first paragraph.

She read it again.

The words were fine. The paragraph was fine. She knew this paragraph. She had practically written this paragraph in her head already.

She read it a third time and it went in properly and she moved to the second paragraph and kept going.

Her hand was on the desk beside the document. She was not looking at it. She was looking at the document. But she was aware of her hand in the way she had not been aware of her hand before approximately three minutes ago — the specific awareness of something you have stopped taking for granted.

She turned the page.

Outside through the glass Freen was back at her desk. She had the file she had taken from the cabinet open in front of her and she was reading it with the same focused stillness she brought to everything. Head slightly down. Pen in her hand but not writing. Just reading.

Becky looked at the glass.

Then she looked at her document.

The third paragraph. She knew this one too. She read it anyway.

—

Freen read the same page four times.

This was not a record. She had read pages more than four times in the past two weeks when the legal terminology defeated her. This page did not contain difficult terminology. She understood every word on this page. She had read it this morning and understood it then too.

She read it a fifth time.

The file was about chain of custody. It was straightforward and she knew it was straightforward and the reason it was requiring five reads was not the content. She was aware of the reason it was requiring five reads and she was managing that awareness the way she managed the other not-useful information — filed, set aside, not examined.

She turned the page.

The new page was also straightforward. She read it once and it went in and she made a note and kept going. Better. Progress.

She did not look at the glass partition.

She was aware, without looking, that Becky was at her desk. She was aware of this the way she was aware of most things in this office — automatically, continuously, a background process that ran without requiring her attention. Becky was at her desk. The office door was open. The afternoon was moving.

These were the facts of the situation.

She turned another page.

—

At three fifteen Noey appeared at the edge of Freen’s desk with two coffees — the office kind, which Freen had started drinking without complaint because refusing it would have required an explanation — and set one down and kept one for herself and perched on the corner of the desk the way she did when she had something to say.

Freen looked at her.

“Nothing,” Noey said, with the expression of someone who had something.

“Okay,” Freen said.

Noey looked at the glass partition. Then at Freen. Then at the glass partition again. She sipped her coffee.

“The filing cabinet,” she said, very casually, in the tone of someone mentioning something of no importance whatsoever.

Freen said nothing.

“I was just going to say,” Noey continued, “that we have a system for the filing cabinet. If two people need the same drawer at the same time, whoever got there first—”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Freen said.

“Right.” Noey nodded. “Good system.”

She slid off the desk and went back to her own work.

Freen looked at her coffee.

She picked it up and drank some and put it back down and turned to the next page of the chain of custody document and read it without difficulty because the not-useful information was filed and she was a professional and the page was straightforward.

She turned another page.

—

The afternoon moved.

The post-lunch quiet gave way to the pre-evening push — Heng off his call and back at his desk, the associates along the wall working faster now, Noey taking a stack of documents to the printer and coming back with another stack. The ordinary rhythm of the firm, Thursday afternoon, three weeks from the end of the biggest trial Armstrong and Associates had run in years.

Freen worked.

Becky worked.

The office door stayed open.

At five thirty one of the associates knocked on Becky’s door frame and asked a question about a deadline and Becky answered it without looking up from her screen and the associate went away satisfied. Heng brought Becky a coffee — the real kind, from the cafe, which Freen noted he did on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he walked past it on his way back from the court registry — and left it on the corner of her desk.

Becky picked it up without looking. Drank. Put it back.

At five forty-five she came to the office door.

Freen looked up.

“The witness prep tomorrow,” Becky said. “Eight thirty. Conference room two.” She paused. “Bring the chain of custody file.”

“The third drawer,” Freen said.

Something moved through Becky’s expression. Brief. Gone.

“Yes,” she said. “Third drawer.”

She went back into her office.

Freen looked at the glass partition for a moment.

Then she looked at the chain of custody file already open on her desk. She had been reading it all afternoon. She knew it well enough now to brief someone else on it, which was probably the point.

She turned to the next page.

The air in the office was slightly different from how it had been this morning. She was aware of this. She imagined Becky was aware of it too, in the way Becky was aware of most things — quietly, completely, without letting it show.

Neither of them said so.

The afternoon finished itself around them and the office emptied out and eventually it was just the two of them again, the way it often was, working in their separate pools of light with the city going dark outside the windows.

Some things didn’t need to be said.

Some things were louder for not being said.

Freen turned the last page of the file and closed it and started on the next one.