Chapter 38

Charlotte had known this was coming.

Not the parking garage specifically – Freen had sent a brief operational report at nine the previous night, factual, three sentences, and Charlotte had read it and sat at her kitchen table for a long time. But the conversation with Becky she had known was coming since the beginning. Since the night she made the call.

She had been preparing for it the way she prepared for difficult things – quietly, without showing the preparation.

She called Becky at eight thirty.

“Come to my office when you’re ready,” she said. “No rush.”

Becky came at nine.

—

She closed the door behind her.

Charlotte was at her desk. Not behind it – she had moved her chair around so there was no desk between them, which was something she did when she needed a conversation to be personal rather than professional. Becky noted this. She sat in the chair across from her.

She looked at Charlotte.

Charlotte looked back.

“Tell me,” Becky said.

So Charlotte told her.

Not everything. The full operational picture was not hers to give and she knew the difference between what she owned and what she didn’t. But enough. The anonymous email. The decision to call Engfa. What Engfa had said about the threat. Freen – who she was, why Charlotte had asked for her specifically, how she had been placed. The cover. The desk outside Becky’s office.

She told it plainly. No softening. No framing designed to manage the reaction. She had decided on the drive in that if she was going to have this conversation she was going to have it honestly.

Becky listened.

She did not interrupt once.

Charlotte knew what this meant. In twenty years of sisterhood and ten years of professional proximity she had never once told Becky something significant without being interrupted at least twice. Becky interrupted when she was engaged – when her mind was moving faster than the information coming in, when she was already building toward something. She interrupted because she was always ahead.

She was not ahead of this.

When Charlotte finished Becky was quiet for a moment.

“How long,” she said.

“Since the first week of trial.”

Becky nodded slowly. Processing. “The desk placement.”

“Yes.”

“You put her directly outside my office.”

“Yes.”

“And you told her to let me train her.”

“Yes.”

Another pause. “You told her that.”

“I needed a reason for her to be close to you that you would accept.”

Becky looked at her. “You manufactured a reason.”

“Yes.”

The office was quiet. Outside through the glass the firm was doing its morning – Noey at her desk, the associates filing in, Heng appearing from the corridor with files. The ordinary Thursday morning of a firm eight days from the end of a major trial.

And at the desk directly outside Becky’s office – Freen. Head down. Working.

“How long have you known about the threat,” Becky said.

“Since February. The email came in February.”

“It’s April.”

“Yes.”

Becky looked at her hands in her lap. “Two months,” she said. “You’ve known for two months.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No.”

“Why.”

Charlotte had thought about how to answer this. Had thought about it on the drive in and at her kitchen table the previous night and probably for two months before that in the small hours when she woke up thinking about it.

“I was protecting you,” she said.

Becky looked at her.

“I know how that sounds,” Charlotte said.

“You were managing me,” Becky said. Her voice was even. Completely level.

Charlotte opened her mouth.

She closed it.

Because it was true. She had told herself it was protection and it was protection and it was also management and both of those things were true simultaneously and she had no answer for the part that was management.

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

The office held them both in its quiet.

Outside through the glass Freen had not looked up from her desk. She had been there when Charlotte arrived and she had been there when Becky walked through the glass partition and she was there now. The same position she was always in – desk facing out, clear sight lines to both the main entrance and the corridor, positioned exactly as Charlotte had asked her to be positioned eight weeks ago.

Still between Becky and every door.

Becky was looking at her through the glass.

“She knew,” Becky said. “Everything she did – she knew why she was doing it.”

“Yes.”

“She knew and I didn’t.”

“Yes.”

“For two months.”

“Yes.”

Becky looked at Freen for a long moment. Freen turned a page. Made a note. Did not look up.

“The men last night,” Becky said.

“Engfa briefed me this morning. They were from Viroj’s network. Surat’s coordination.” Charlotte paused. “It’s not the first time. There was a tail three weeks ago that Freen intercepted. There was – there were other things.”

Becky turned to look at her. “Other things.”

“Two incidents. She handled both. You weren’t aware of either.”

Becky was quiet for a moment. “How many times has she-“

“I don’t have the full count,” Charlotte said. “She reports to Engfa. I receive summaries.”

Becky looked back at the glass.

“She never said anything,” she said.

“No.”

“All this time. She never-” She stopped. Started again. “The coffee. The late nights. Reading the closing argument sections back to me. All of it.”

“All of it,” Charlotte said.

Becky sat with this.

Charlotte watched her sit with it. She had known Becky for thirty-two years. Had watched her process things since they were children – the particular stillness she went into when something was too large to move through quickly. She went into it now. Sat in the chair with her hands in her lap and was very still.

“I’m angry,” Becky said finally.

“I know.”

“At you.”

“I know.”

“And at her.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“And at myself,” Becky said. “For not-” She stopped. “I noticed things. All along I noticed things. I kept filing them away.”

“You trusted me,” Charlotte said. “You trusted my word about her.”

“Yes.” A pause. “I also trusted her. Which is the part I’m most-” She stopped again.

Charlotte waited.

Becky looked at the glass. At Freen turning another page at her desk outside.

“She lied to me every day,” Becky said.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “She did.”

“And she kept me safe every day.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “She did that too.”

Both of those things were true. Charlotte had decided not to try to arrange them into something more comfortable. They were both true and Becky was going to have to decide what to do with both of them being true.

That was not Charlotte’s decision to make.

Becky stood up.

Charlotte stood too.

They looked at each other across the small space between the chairs – two women who had been managing each other carefully for thirty-two years and who had just had the most honest conversation of the past two months.

“Eight days,” Becky said.

“Eight days,” Charlotte said.

Becky nodded once. She turned and walked to the office door. She opened it.

She stopped.

“Charlotte.”

Charlotte looked at her.

“Don’t do that again,” Becky said. “Whatever you were protecting me from – don’t make that decision for me again.”

Charlotte held her gaze. “Okay,” she said.

Becky went back through the glass partition to her office.

She closed the door.

—

Freen had not looked up.

She had heard the door to Charlotte’s office open and close. She had not looked up then either. She had been at her desk since seven fifteen and she had been working and she was going to keep working because the mission had not changed and the threat was still real and Jeff was still out there and Surat was still moving and working was the thing she could do.

She turned a page.

The door to Becky’s office was closed.

She had watched Becky walk across the outer office with the particular set of her jaw that meant something had shifted and she had watched the door close and she had turned a page.

Her phone buzzed.

Engfa.

Charlotte spoke with her. How is she.

Freen looked at the closed door.

Working, she typed back.

A pause. Then: And you.

Freen looked at the closed door for another moment.

Also working, she typed.

She put the phone down and turned a page and kept going.

—

Becky went home at six.

She didn’t say goodnight to Freen. She came out of her office with her bag and her jacket and walked through the outer office and through the glass partition and that was that.

Freen watched her go.

She sat at her desk for a while after. The office emptied out around her – Heng at five thirty, Noey at six, the associates throughout the afternoon. By six thirty it was just her.

She did the final check. Doors. Windows. Security panel.

She left.

—

Becky’s apartment was quiet when she got home.

She changed. She made dinner – something simple, she didn’t have the focus for complicated. She sat at the table and ate and looked at the window.

She was angry.

It was clean and clear, the anger – she could feel exactly what it was made of. The two months of being managed. The coffee and the late nights and all of it running on a purpose she hadn’t known. Freen knowing and Becky not knowing and that asymmetry sitting in everything she thought she had understood about the past two months.

That was the anger.

Underneath it was something else.

She thought about the parking garage. Eleven seconds. She thought about three weeks ago when she had been in a hurry and had taken the side street and been followed and hadn’t known and someone had made sure she never knew. She thought about a jacket on her chair and stars and rain and a Sunday on a conference room floor.

She thought about my name is real.

The anger and the underneath were very difficult to separate.

She washed her dishes and stood at her window and looked at the city.

Eight days.

She had eight days until the closing arguments. Then the case would be done. Then everything that had been waiting on the other side of the case would be there.

She had eight days.

She would figure out the rest after that.

She went to bed.

She lay in the dark and felt the anger and felt the underneath and told herself she was going to sleep now.

She did not sleep for a long time.