Chapter 9

The problem — and Lookmhee would think about this later, much later, lying on her bed staring at the ceiling — was that nobody had told her there would be a second time.

She had understood the meeting with Meena. That had a clear purpose, a beginning and an end, a reason for Sonya to be there that could be explained in practical terms. She had filed it under favor between friends and closed the folder and told herself that was the whole of it.

She had not expected Becky.

It was a Saturday — the Saturday after the Meena meeting — and the group had plans for lunch at a noodle place three blocks from the building that Engfa had been recommending for two weeks. Lookmhee had been looking forward to it. Normal lunch. Normal Saturday. No complications.

She was putting on her shoes in the hallway when Becky appeared at the top of the stairs with the expression she wore when she had already decided something and was only now getting around to telling the relevant parties.

“Change of plans,” Becky said.

“What kind of change?” Lookmhee asked, with the wariness of someone who had been learning, over the past weeks, that Becky’s changes of plan ranged from mildly inconvenient to genuinely chaotic.

“The noodle place is closed for a private event.” Becky leaned against the wall with the ease of someone delivering good news rather than bad. “So I found somewhere else. A little further. Nicer, actually — there’s outdoor seating, it’s a nice day, Freen already agreed.”

“Okay,” Lookmhee said slowly. “That sounds fine.”

“Great.” Becky smiled. “Also I may have mentioned to a few people that you and Sonya are — “

“Becky.”

“— together.” She said the last word quickly. “Just casually. In passing. To some mutual friends from the building’s lower floors who were also going to be at the noodle place.”

Lookmhee stared at her. “You told people.”

“I mentioned it. There’s a difference in emphasis.”

“There is not a difference in—” Lookmhee stopped. She looked at Becky’s entirely unrepentant face. “Does Sonya know?”

“I was going to tell her right after I told you.”

“Becky.”

“It just came up naturally in conversation—”

“How does that come up naturally—”

“Someone asked if you were seeing anyone!” Becky threw her hands up slightly. “And I said yes, and they asked who, and it seemed wrong to be vague about it when the answer was right upstairs—”

Sonya’s door opened.

They both turned. Sonya came out into the hallway already wearing her coat, already looking at Becky with the expression of someone who had heard approximately enough of the conversation through the door to know what was happening.

“You told someone,” she said to Becky. Not a question.

“A few someones,” Becky said. “Technically.”

A silence.

“How many is a few?” Sonya said.

“Three?” Becky tried. “Maybe four. The Wangs on the second floor and possibly the woman from 3D who has the cat — she asked a very direct question and I was caught off guard by the cat—”

“The cat asked about us?” Lookmhee said.

“The woman with the cat—”

“Becky,” Sonya’s voice was very even. “When we get to the restaurant, these people will be there?”

Becky’s pause was answer enough.

Sonya looked at Lookmhee. Lookmhee looked back at her. There was a moment of silent conversation — the kind that happened between people who had spent enough time paying attention to each other to communicate without words — and what it said was: this is Becky’s fault and yes and what do we do and apparently we go to lunch.

“Fine,” Sonya said. She looked at Becky. “If you interfere once — “

“I will be the picture of restraint,” Becky said.

“You have never been the picture of restraint in your life.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

✦ ✦ ✦

The restaurant was a terrace place on a long, tree-lined street that Lookmhee hadn’t been to before. It had small round tables and metal chairs and the kind of casual prettiness that came from a place that knew it didn’t need to try very hard. The lunch crowd was already there when they arrived — Freen and TK at a table near the edge, TK looking unbothered as always, Freen waving enthusiastically before they had even fully arrived.

And at the table next to them, as Becky had warned and failed to adequately prepare anyone for, were the Wangs from the second floor — a cheerful, sharp-eyed pair who clearly already knew something was going on — and a woman Lookmhee vaguely recognized from the third floor who did indeed have a cat, or at least had the energy of someone who had a cat.

Introductions happened. Names were exchanged. And then, inevitably, one of the Wangs — the one with the short hair who spoke first in all situations — looked between Lookmhee and Sonya with bright, interested eyes and said: “So you two are together?”

The table went quiet in that way tables did.

Lookmhee felt Sonya’s hand settle very naturally at the back of her chair. Not touching her — just there. Present. An unmistakable signal of proximity that was somehow more convincing than anything staged could have been.

“Yes,” Sonya said. Simply. The way she said everything.

The Wang with the short hair smiled. “How did that happen? You live across the hall from each other, right?”

“She moved in,” Sonya said. “I noticed her.”

Lookmhee turned to look at her. It was a reflex, involuntary. Sonya was looking at the Wang with the short hair with her calm steady expression and did not turn back, but there was the faintest shift along her jaw — something that might have been awareness of being watched.

I noticed her.

Lookmhee looked at the table. She picked up the menu.

“That’s so lovely,” the woman from 3D said warmly. “How long have you been together?”

“About two months,” Lookmhee said. Her voice came out steady. Good. “Since I moved in.”

“She needed help with her boxes,” Sonya said.

“I didn’t ask for help with my boxes—”

“You were on your third trip up the stairs and you’d been going for two hours,” Sonya said. “You needed help.”

“I had a system—”

“You labeled one of the boxes emotional damage,” Sonya said, to the table, with the absolute composure of someone sharing a completely ordinary fact. “I knew immediately she was going to be trouble.”

There was a moment of surprised laughter from the Wangs and the woman from 3D and a muffled sound from Becky who was very obviously trying not to react. Freen’s hand flew to her mouth. TK looked at the sky.

Lookmhee stared at Sonya.

Sonya met her gaze with that not-quite-smile, and for just one moment — one brief, unguarded moment — there was something in her eyes that was warm and private and entirely real.

“Trouble,” Lookmhee said.

“Significant trouble,” Sonya confirmed.

“Okay but she’s not wrong,” Freen said, because Freen could never stay quiet when she had something true to add.

“Freen,” said Lookmhee.

“I’m just agreeing with Sonya.”

“That’s somehow worse—”

“Why is it worse when I agree with her—”

And then they were all talking at once the way they always did, and the table had expanded naturally into the kind of warm, chaotic lunch that Lookmhee had come to expect from any gathering of these particular people, and somewhere in the middle of it she felt Sonya’s hand, at some point, settle briefly at her elbow — adjusting her seat, redirecting her attention to something Engfa was saying across the table, nothing more — and it was so easy, so completely natural, that Lookmhee almost didn’t notice.

Almost.

✦ ✦ ✦

After lunch, walking back, the group spread out across the pavement the way groups did when everyone was full and comfortable and unhurried. Freen was walking ahead with TK, gesturing about something with both hands. Becky had somehow ended up in deep conversation with the Wang sisters and was several paces back. Engfa walked beside Lookmhee for a stretch, and then Engfa stopped to look at something in a shop window, and then it was just Lookmhee and Sonya, side by side.

The afternoon had gone warm. The trees on the street were doing their green and golden thing. It was, Lookmhee thought, a very good day for a fake date.

“The emotional damage thing,” she said.

“Yes?” said Sonya.

“You didn’t have to say that.”

“It made them laugh. It made the situation comfortable.” Sonya glanced at her. “It was strategic.”

“It was,” Lookmhee agreed. “It was also — you remembered that. Still.”

A pause. Three steps.

“It was the first thing I learned about you,” Sonya said. “It’s a memorable detail.”

Lookmhee thought about that. About what it meant that Sonya — who forgot nothing, she was learning, who kept a careful record in her head of everything she noticed — had filed that specific detail under things worth keeping.

“Can I ask you something?” Lookmhee said.

“You always say that before asking,” Sonya observed. “You don’t need permission.”

“Habit.” She paused. “At the coffee shop. Last week. You said — you said you weren’t acting.”

The street sounds filled the space between them for a moment. Somewhere ahead, Freen laughed at something TK had said.

“I remember what I said,” Sonya said. Her voice was level.

“I know. I just—” Lookmhee searched for the right words and found them unsatisfyingly incomplete. “I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Sonya was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Lookmhee thought she might just not answer, which was a thing Sonya was allowed to do and occasionally did when a question had gotten too close to something real.

But then she said: “I was sitting with you. That’s all I meant. I wasn’t performing a role. I was just — there. With you.” Another pause. “That’s not a complicated thing.”

“It’s not complicated,” Lookmhee agreed quietly. “It just — means something.”

Sonya didn’t respond to that. But she also didn’t disagree, which with Sonya, Lookmhee was learning, was its own kind of answer.

They walked the rest of the way back without talking much. The city did its afternoon thing around them. Lookmhee thought about what she had said — it means something — and waited to feel like she’d said too much.

She didn’t, quite.

✦ ✦ ✦

Back at the building, in the lobby, Becky cornered them both before they could escape to the elevator.

“How was that?” she asked, with the air of someone conducting a debrief.

“Becky,” Sonya said.

“You were very convincing,” Becky said. She looked at Lookmhee. “Both of you. Very natural. I was genuinely moved.”

“You were trying not to laugh for most of it.” Lookmhee said.

“Because it was going so well.” Becky looked between them with her sharp, certain eyes. “The significant trouble moment. I want to note for the record that that was objectively—”

“Becky,” Sonya said again, with slightly more weight.

Becky pressed her lips together. “Noted,” she said. “I’m done.”

She was extremely not done, Lookmhee could tell. She was simply choosing a strategic pause.

They got in the elevator. Becky waved from the lobby with an expression of pure satisfaction as the doors closed.

Lookmhee and Sonya stood side by side as the elevator rose. The numbers changed. Two. Three. Four.

“She’s going to be impossible,” Lookmhee said.

“She’s always been impossible,” Sonya said. “This just gives her material.”

“We could tell her it was just the one time. Today and the coffee shop. Done.”

“We could,” Sonya said.

The elevator opened. They walked down the hall. At their doors, they stopped in the way they always did now, the easy pausing that had become its own small habit.

“Was it?” Lookmhee asked. “Just the one time?”

She hadn’t planned to say it. It came out in the particular way things came out of her when she stopped editing — directly, from somewhere honest.

Sonya looked at her. The afternoon light from the hallway window was behind her and it made her expression harder to read than usual, which was already difficult, which was already something Lookmhee had been working on.

“I don’t know,” Sonya said. And for Sonya — who always knew, who was always certain, who dealt in accurate statements — I don’t know was the most unguarded thing she could have said.

She went into 4C.

Lookmhee stood at her door.

The hallway was quiet. From somewhere below, faintly, she could hear Freen saying something and Becky responding and the sound of their building doing its ordinary thing around all of them.

She went inside.

She put her bag down. She made tea. She sat on her bed.

She opened her notebook and looked at the blank page for a long time.

Then she wrote, slowly and carefully, the way she wrote things she meant:

I think I am in a significant amount of trouble.

She looked at it.

Then she wrote underneath, smaller:

I think she might be too.

She closed the notebook. She drank her tea. She looked at the wall between her apartment and 4C for no particular reason and then looked away and told herself firmly that she was going to go to sleep and not think about any of this until tomorrow.

She did not go to sleep for a long time.

✦ ✦ ✦