Chapter 8

The problem with living in a building full of people who paid attention was that nothing stayed private for very long.

By Wednesday morning — two days after Sonya had knocked on Lookmhee’s door and said I’ll go with you in that calm, certain way of hers — the entire group knew. Lookmhee had not told them. Sonya had definitely not told them. And yet when Lookmhee came down to the lobby on her way to work, Becky was standing by the mailboxes with a cup of coffee and the expression of someone who had received excellent news.

“So,” Becky said.

“Don’t,” said Lookmhee.

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying. Don’t say it.”

Becky smiled into her coffee. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was going to say,” Becky said, with great dignity, “that it’s very nice that Sonya is going with you on Thursday. As a friend. In a completely normal and uncomplicated capacity.” She paused. “That’s all.”

Lookmhee looked at her.

“The whiteboard is updated, by the way,” Becky added. “Purely for administrative purposes.”

“Becky.”

“Administrative.”

Lookmhee walked out of the building.

Behind her she heard Becky say something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like this is going so well but she decided not to turn around.

✦ ✦ ✦

At the bookstore that morning, she rearranged the front display for the third time in a week.

She knew she was doing it because she was nervous and rearranging things was what she did when she was nervous — it was productive enough to feel like action but small enough not to require real decisions. Dao watched her move the same two books back and forth for ten minutes before appearing at her shoulder.

“The display is fine,” Dao said.

“I know,” Lookmhee said.

“It was fine before you touched it.”

“I know that too.”

Dao looked at her with the patient expression of someone who had watched many young people work through things at the front of her bookstore. “Is it a person thing or a work thing?” she asked.

“Person thing.”

Dao nodded. She picked up the two books Lookmhee had been moving and put them back in their original positions. “The display was better before,” she said, not unkindly. “Go make tea. The shelf in the back needs dusting.”

Lookmhee made tea. She dusted the shelf. She felt, by the time the afternoon light came through the window, marginally more settled — something about the physical rhythm of the work, the smell of the bookstore, the particular quiet of a place where stories lived, all of it doing what it always did when her head was loud.

She thought about Meena.

Not with longing — she was sure of that now, in a way she hadn’t been when the message first arrived. What she felt was simpler and more complicated than longing. It was the awareness of a person who had known her when she was someone she wasn’t entirely anymore. And there was something both uncomfortable and important about that — about being seen by someone whose version of you was eight months out of date.

She thought about what Sonya had said. Leaving a place doesn’t cancel out what happened there.

She put a book back on the shelf and thought: no. But you get to decide what it means.

✦ ✦ ✦

Wednesday evening the group chat was, as usual, chaotic.

It had started with Freen sending a picture of her dinner with the caption I made this!!! and the dinner in question was a bowl of instant noodles with an egg on top, which Becky had immediately called a crime against cooking, which led to a fifteen-message argument about whether instant noodles counted as cooking at all, during which TK said yes and Engfa said it depends on the execution and Sonya said the egg is the only redeemable part and Freen said SONYA with approximately six exclamation marks.

Lookmhee read all of it lying on her bed with the lights on low and felt something warm and settled in her chest that she recognized by now as the specific feeling of having people.

Then a private message came in. Not the group chat — a direct message, from Sonya.

What time Thursday?

Lookmhee stared at it. The directness of it, the absence of preamble, was so completely Sonya that she felt the corner of her mouth pull up before she could stop it.

Two o’clock, she typed. At Common Ground. Meena’s coming from her work thing across town.

A pause of about forty seconds.

I’ll meet you outside at quarter to.

You don’t have to—

Quarter to, Sonya sent again. And then nothing else, conversation closed, matter settled.

Lookmhee put her phone on her chest and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about the quarter to. About Sonya deciding, on her own, without being asked, that fifteen minutes early was the right amount of time to arrive. Enough time to settle. Enough time before the thing that was making Lookmhee nervous to have someone beside her who was steady.

She thought: Sonya is very good at identifying what someone needs without being asked.

Then she thought: I should stop noticing things like that.

Then she picked up her notebook and wrote for an hour.

✦ ✦ ✦

Thursday came with grey skies and the smell of rain that hadn’t arrived yet — that particular held-breath quality of a city waiting for weather. Lookmhee stood outside Common Ground at one forty-three, wearing her good jacket, her notebook in her bag out of habit, trying to look like someone who was perfectly calm and fine and not at all on the verge of rearranging her bag contents for the fourth time.

She was on the third time when footsteps stopped beside her.

She looked up.

Sonya was there. She was wearing a dark coat Lookmhee hadn’t seen before, her hair neat, her expression the composed and certain one that she wore when she had decided how something was going to go. She looked at Lookmhee. Then at the bag.

“You’re reorganizing your bag,” she said.

“I’m — looking for something.”

“You’re not looking for anything.”

Lookmhee stopped and closed the bag. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Sonya said. She looked at the coffee shop window and then back at Lookmhee. “How are you?”

“Nervous,” Lookmhee admitted. “Which is stupid. It’s just coffee. She’s not — Meena was never unkind to me. It wasn’t that kind of ending.”

“The not-unkind endings are sometimes the hardest ones,” Sonya said. “Less to be angry about.”

Lookmhee looked at her. “That’s very specific.”

Sonya looked at the sky. “Observation,” she said simply, which was the word she always used when she’d said something true about herself without meaning to.

“Right,” Lookmhee said gently. She didn’t push it.

They stood side by side outside the coffee shop. A few people passed on the pavement. A taxi went by. Somewhere down the block someone was playing music from an open window, something slow and slightly sad.

“Rules,” Sonya said.

“What?”

“If we’re doing this — ” she turned to face Lookmhee fully, which she did not always do when they talked, usually preferring a slight angle, something that gave her an exit, “— there should be rules. So we’re consistent.”

Lookmhee blinked. “Rules for fake dating?”

“Rules for the interaction,” Sonya said, with the precision of someone who had given this more thought than she would probably admit. “We’ve known each other — how long are we saying?”

“Since I moved in. That’s true anyway.”

“Fine. Since you moved in.” Sonya nodded. “We don’t need a complicated story. The simpler it is the harder it is to get wrong. You moved in, we met, we’ve been — ” a barely perceptible pause, ” — together. Since then.”

“Two months,” Lookmhee supplied.

“Two months.” Sonya agreed. “That’s recent enough to still be in the early stage. It means we don’t need to know everything about each other’s history. It accounts for any inconsistencies.”

Lookmhee looked at her with something approaching admiration. “You’ve planned this out.”

“I thought about it.”

“When?”

“Last night.” Said completely without embarrassment, just as a fact. “It seemed worth being prepared.”

Lookmhee thought about Sonya in her apartment the night before, thinking through scenarios, planning for inconsistencies, treating the whole thing with the same careful thoroughness she brought to everything. Something about the image made her feel a little unsteady in a way she wasn’t going to examine right now.

“What else?” she asked.

“Physical contact,” Sonya said. Matter-of-fact, clinical. “It should look natural. Which means it can’t be — staged. If it happens, it happens because it fits the moment, not because we decided in advance that we would do it.”

“Okay,” Lookmhee said carefully.

“If it becomes uncomfortable for either of us, a signal.” Sonya thought for a moment. “If I tap the back of your hand twice it means slow down or redirect. You can use the same.”

“We have a safe word? For fake dating?”

“A signal,” Sonya said. “It’s sensible.”

“It’s extremely thorough.” Lookmhee said.

“You say that like it’s a criticism.”

“It’s not. I just—” she looked at Sonya, at the composed face and the carefully thought-out plan and the dark coat she had clearly worn deliberately, and felt something she quickly put away, “—I appreciate it. Really. Thank you.”

Sonya looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at the door of the coffee shop. “She’s not here yet.”

“No. She said two.”

“Then we have five minutes.” She looked back at Lookmhee. “Are you ready?”

“No,” Lookmhee said honestly.

“Yes you are,” Sonya said. With the same certainty she used for facts. Like it was simply true and she was reporting it.

Lookmhee breathed out. “Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”

They went inside.

✦ ✦ ✦

Common Ground was warm and smelled like coffee and the rain that was now beginning to fall lightly outside the windows. They got to the counter before Meena arrived and Lookmhee ordered her usual latte and Sonya ordered a black coffee and they moved to a table near the window — chosen, Lookmhee suspected, by Sonya for reasons of visibility and positioning, because Sonya chose tables the way other people chose chess moves.

They sat across from each other.

There was a moment — just a moment, brief and strange — where Lookmhee looked at Sonya in the warm light of the coffee shop, the rain starting properly outside, the low sound of the space around them, and thought: this looks real. Not in a stagey, performed way. In a way that felt like it had its own quiet weight.

“Stop thinking so hard,” Sonya said, without looking up from her coffee.

“I’m not—”

“You are. I can tell.” She looked up. “She’ll see you the way you actually are, not the way you think you look. So stop performing and just — be.”

“Is that advice for the fake dating situation or general life advice?”

Sonya considered. “Both,” she said.

The door of the coffee shop opened.

Lookmhee looked up.

Meena was exactly as she remembered — a little taller than average, dark coat, the way she scanned a room when she entered it, finding the faces she was looking for. Her eyes found Lookmhee and she smiled — a real smile, slightly uncertain, the smile of a person who was also working out how this was going to go.

And then her eyes moved to Sonya.

A barely visible adjustment in her expression. Quick, almost imperceptible. But there.

She came to the table. Lookmhee stood because it felt strange not to and they had the slightly awkward moment of two people deciding whether to hug, and then they did, briefly, and then Lookmhee stepped back and said, with a steadiness she was genuinely surprised to feel:

“This is Sonya. We live in the same building.”

And Sonya, without missing a beat, looked up at Meena with her calm, steady gaze, and said: “Hi. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

She said it pleasantly. Simply. With the absolute conviction of someone stating a truth.

Lookmhee felt Sonya’s hand, very briefly, settle at the small of her back — light as anything, barely there, but steady — and then move away.

She sat back down.

Her heart was doing something she was choosing not to pay attention to.

Meena pulled out the chair across from them and sat, and the conversation began, and Lookmhee found — to her own genuine surprise — that she felt completely fine. Better than fine. She felt, in fact, like exactly the person she had been trying to be when she moved here. Someone new. Someone settled. Someone who had people.

She reached for her coffee.

Under the table, their knees were almost touching.

Neither of them moved away.

An hour later, Meena left. She had a dinner thing, she said, and it was good to see Lookmhee, she meant that, she was glad she was doing well, she really did look well, and Sonya it was nice to meet you.

Sonya said likewise in a tone that was perfectly cordial and entirely unreadable.

The door closed.

The coffee shop settled back around them. Outside, the rain was proper now — steady and grey, the street shiny with it.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then Lookmhee let out a breath she had apparently been holding for most of the last hour. She put both hands around her coffee cup. She looked at the table.

“That was,” she said.

“Fine,” Sonya said.

“Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah, it was actually fine.”

“You were fine,” Sonya said. The same way she said things. Certain. Accurate.

Lookmhee looked at her. “You were — you were very convincing.”

“I wasn’t acting,” Sonya said. And then, as if she’d said too much, she picked up her coffee and drank the last of it and looked out the window at the rain.

The words sat between them. I wasn’t acting. Not a confession — Sonya had not said it like a confession, had said it like a clarification, a simple correction of terminology. But it was there, in the space between their coffee cups, small and clear and not nothing.

Lookmhee looked at the rain.

“The plan worked then,” she said, carefully.

“There was never really a plan,” Sonya said. “I just sat with you.”

And that, Lookmhee thought, was the most Sonya thing she had ever said. No performance. No pretending. Just — sitting with someone who needed someone there.

She looked at her. Sonya was still watching the rain, her expression the quiet, unguarded one she had when she forgot to put the careful neutral face on. The one Lookmhee had been seeing more and more.

“Thank you,” Lookmhee said. Softly. “For today.”

Sonya glanced at her. Just for a second. “Don’t thank me,” she said.

“I’m going to anyway.”

The not-quite-smile. Brief, private. “Fine,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

Outside, the rain fell on the city. Inside, the coffee shop was warm. They sat there for another half hour without any particular reason to stay, just the rain and the warmth and the low sound of the space around them, and neither of them suggested leaving.

✦ ✦ ✦