Chapter 21

She had slept three hours.

This was not unusual in operational contexts – Freen had functioned on less, had run full missions on considerably less, and three hours was enough to be sharp if you were disciplined about it. She was disciplined about it. She ran in the morning the way she always ran, ate breakfast, arrived at the firm at seven thirty with the threat assessment filed and the Surat information sitting in a separate part of her mind that she had sectioned off from the rest of her morning.

She was good at sections.

The section that contained Colonel Surat and the 2am call and the specific weight of knowing that the man she needed to protect was being hunted by someone who had signed four procurement authorisations and had a great deal to lose – that section was closed. She would open it when she needed it. Right now she needed the section that contained the contingency argument revision and the witness prep notes and the covering of a junior associate who was supposed to be learning law and who was therefore sitting at her desk reading a file about evidence authentication as if that was the most important thing in her world.

She read about evidence authentication.

She was good at sections.

—

The morning moved.

Becky had come in at seven fifty-eight and gone directly into her office and worked through the first two hours without surfacing, which meant either the closing argument was going well or it was going badly enough that interruption was inadvisable. Freen had learned to read the quality of Becky’s closed-door mornings and this one felt like the former – the particular quality of focused silence that meant something was happening rather than refusing to happen.

At ten thirty the door opened.

Becky came out with her coffee cup – empty, which meant she had been in there since before seven fifty-eight and had already finished one and needed another. She went to the kitchen. Came back. Went into her office. The door stayed open this time.

Progress, then.

Freen went back to the evidence authentication file.

She had been at it for an hour and she understood approximately seventy percent of it which was better than the fifty percent she had managed on her first read two weeks ago. The remaining thirty percent she had notes on – specific terms, specific provisions – and she was working through them one at a time with the patience of someone who had decided that learning this particular language was a mission objective and was therefore going to complete it regardless of how long it took.

This was not how she had expected to spend the two months after her last field rotation.

She turned a page.

—

Noey arrived back from a client meeting at eleven fifteen with the particular energy of someone who had spent the morning in a room with difficult people and had handled it and was now back in a room with people she liked and was therefore very slightly more herself than usual.

She dropped her bag at her desk. She looked at Heng around the corner. She said something – Freen didn’t catch the words, she was reading and the distance was enough that the words blurred into tone – and whatever it was, Heng responded and Noey responded to that and within about forty-five seconds they were in the middle of something that was clearly about the difficult people from the client meeting and was clearly, from the shape of both their voices, extremely unflattering to those people.

Freen kept reading.

She was on the third paragraph of a provision about documentary authentication when she heard Becky laugh.

She stopped reading.

She knew all of Becky’s professional sounds by now – the tone she used in client calls versus court preparation calls, the particular timbre of her voice when she was explaining something versus when she was asking something, the short exhale that meant she had found what she was looking for in a document. She had catalogued them without deciding to, the way she catalogued everything.

She had not heard this one before.

It was not the professional laugh – the one she occasionally used in client contexts, warm and controlled. This was different. This was the kind of laugh that arrived before you decided to laugh, the kind that took over your whole face. Noey had said something that landed exactly right and Becky’s laugh came out of her office door and into the outer office and it was – undefended. Completely unguarded. No professional frame around it at all.

Freen looked up.

She knew she was going to look up. She did not decide to. It simply happened, the way looking at the window the first morning had happened and the four seconds on day one had happened and the eleven minutes listening to the phone call had happened. Her eyes went to Becky’s office doorway.

Becky was turned slightly toward Noey’s direction, one hand on her office doorframe, and she was laughing with her whole face – eyes creased, head tilted back slightly, completely unselfconscious in the way she almost never was in this building.

Freen had seen Becky in court. Had seen her in client meetings and partner discussions and heated exchanges with opposing counsel. Had seen her tired and focused and sharp and careful. Had memorised her professional expressions the way she memorised everything – thoroughly, without gaps.

She had not seen this one.

It was not a professional expression. It was just Becky. Becky with nothing in the way.

She became aware that she had been looking for too long.

She looked away.

She looked at her file. The documentary authentication provision. Third paragraph. She had been on the third paragraph before and she was on it again now and the words were the same words they had been before and they were going in at approximately the same rate which was to say not at all.

She felt Becky look at her.

She knew it the way she knew most things in this office – not because she saw it but because the quality of the room shifted slightly when Becky’s attention moved. Six weeks had calibrated her to it without her asking to be calibrated.

She kept her eyes on the file.

One full second.

She could feel the second passing. She did not look up. She read the third paragraph of the documentary authentication provision and understood none of it and did not look up.

Then Becky was laughing again at something else Noey had said and the moment was over and the room went back to being the room and Freen turned to the next page of the file and started reading.

Her phone buzzed on the desk beside her.

She turned it over.

Nam.

It was a photograph. Taken from above – the office camera, she recognised the angle. It showed the outer office from the perspective of the ceiling corner camera near the kitchen. In it, clearly visible, was Freen’s desk and Becky’s office doorway. In it, also clearly visible, were two people who were oriented toward each other in a way that was not entirely explicable by professional context.

Below the photograph: threat assessment update?

Freen put the phone face down.

She turned back to her file.

The third paragraph. Documentary authentication. She read it for what was now the fourth time and something in it finally resolved into meaning and she wrote a note in the margin and moved to the fourth paragraph.

Her phone buzzed again.

She turned it over.

*freen*

She put it face down.

It buzzed again.

She turned it over. i’m going to keep sending until you respond

She picked up the phone. She typed: office is secure.

She put it down.

It buzzed immediately. that is not what I asked

She looked at the phone for a moment. She typed: working. She put it face down and did not pick it up again for the rest of the morning.

—

Becky was aware that she had looked.

She was aware of it in the way she was aware of most things she would have preferred not to be aware of – clearly, precisely, without being able to do anything about it. She had been laughing at something Noey said and she had looked across the office and Freen had been looking at her and then Freen had looked away.

One second.

One second of Freen looking at her with an expression that was not the professional expression and not the operational expression and not any of the expressions that Becky had been cataloguing for six weeks. Something quieter. Something she couldn’t put in the right folder.

She had kept laughing. At the time it had felt like the right thing to do – keep laughing, let Noey think everything was normal, let the moment pass without acknowledgement.

The moment had passed.

The expression stayed with her.

She went back into her office and sat at her closing argument and wrote two sentences and read them back and they were good sentences and she kept going. The work was good. The closing argument was coming together in a way that felt right – she had been at this particular section since eight this morning and the shape of it was finally clear to her and she was getting it down while the clarity held.

She wrote for another hour.

At twelve thirty she stopped for the lunch Heng had left on the edge of her desk. She ate at her desk and looked at the closing argument and thought about the structure of the final section.

She did not think about one second across the office.

She ate her lunch and thought about the closing argument.

She was mostly successful.

—

The afternoon was full – a phone conference at two, a witness prep note to review, a back-and-forth with opposing counsel’s office about a disclosure issue that took an hour longer than it should have because opposing counsel’s assistant kept transferring her to the wrong extension. By five she had dealt with everything on the list and was back at the closing argument and the office was quieting into its end-of-day rhythm.

At six she closed the document.

It was good. Not finished – there was still a section she wasn’t happy with and she knew from experience that being unhappy with a section meant working on it until she wasn’t – but good. Better than this morning.

She packed up.

Freen was still at her desk. She was writing something – the focused posture, pen moving, not looking at the screen. She had been at it since five, Becky had noticed this in the peripheral way she noticed most things involving Freen.

Becky picked up her bag. “Go home,” she said. “It’s Friday.”

Freen looked up. “The witness prep note-“

“Is done. I reviewed it.” Becky looked at her. “Go home.”

Freen looked at her for a moment. Then she capped her pen and closed her file and started packing up with the efficiency she brought to everything. Becky walked to the glass partition door.

She didn’t look back.

She pressed the lift button and waited. Behind her she could hear Freen finishing up – the sound of a drawer closing, a chair pushed back. The lift arrived. Becky stepped in.

She pressed the button for the ground floor.

The doors closed.

—

She made dinner at seven thirty. Something simple – she was not a complicated cook on a good day and Friday evenings were not good cooking days. She ate at her kitchen table with the closing argument open on her laptop and the Friday evening sounds of the building around her.

She told herself she was reading the closing argument.

She read two paragraphs.

She thought about one second across the office. The expression she couldn’t put in the right folder. She told herself it was nothing – a moment of eye contact in a shared workspace, the kind of thing that happened between colleagues all the time and meant nothing and was nothing.

This was not convincing.

She closed the laptop.

She thought about something else. She was deliberate about it – actively redirected, the way she redirected in court when something was pulling her attention where she didn’t want it to go.

She thought about the closing argument. The section she wasn’t happy with.

She thought about the conversation about the stars.

She set her fork down.

She picked it up again.

She finished dinner and washed up and went and stood at her window for a while. The Friday evening city was doing what it did – louder than the weekdays, more light, the particular energy of a city releasing the week. She looked at it and thought about the closing argument section and thought about three stars in a straight line and thought about one second.

She went to bed.

She lay in the dark and thought about all of it for a while and then she made a decision – not about any of it specifically, just the general decision that tonight was not the night to examine any of it because she had a closing argument to finish and two and a half weeks to finish it in and there was simply no space for anything else right now.

This decision lasted approximately four minutes.

Then she was thinking about the stars again.

She closed her eyes.

She thought about you’re not what I thought you were and two seconds on a jacket and one second across an office and she thought – not examining any of it, she was absolutely not examining any of it – that Noey was very funny and she was glad Noey worked here.

She went to sleep.

It took a while.