Chapter 32

The firm’s annual legal networking dinner was held at a hotel on Wireless Road.

Becky had attended every year for six years. It was the kind of event that was professionally useful and personally unremarkable – a large room, good food, the same faces she saw at courthouses and conferences arranged in slightly different configurations. She was good at these events. She moved through them easily, said the right things to the right people, left at a reasonable hour.

She had told Freen she didn’t need to come.

Freen had come anyway.

She was across the room now in a dark blazer with a drink she had been holding for forty minutes without finishing, positioned near the window with a clear view of both the entrance and the main seating area. She looked like a junior associate at a professional networking event. She looked completely comfortable. She looked like someone who was simply there.

Becky knew exactly where she was the whole time.

She was talking to a judge she knew from the commercial court about nothing in particular and she was listening properly and contributing correctly and she knew exactly where Freen was.

She did not look at her.

—

Irin found Freen at nine fifteen.

She had been watching her for most of the evening – not obviously, not the way Freen watched things, but steadily. From across the room and then from closer. The way she tracked the entrance every time someone came in. The way she was positioned. The way she moved through the room when she moved – slightly different from how the lawyers moved, something underneath the ease that was not quite the same thing as ease.

And the way she watched Becky.

Irin picked up a fresh drink from a passing tray and walked to the window.

Freen saw her coming. She didn’t change her posture but she tracked her in a way that Irin recognised – the updating of a mental picture. She was being assessed. She found this interesting rather than alarming.

She stopped beside Freen at the window.

For a moment they both just stood there looking at the room.

“You’ve been watching the entrance all evening,” Irin said.

“Habit,” Freen said.

“And her.”

Freen said nothing.

Irin looked at her profile. The still face. The drink she wasn’t drinking. The eyes that had been moving around the room all night but kept finding their way back to the same place.

“I’ve been watching you for weeks,” Irin said. “Since the first Thursday I came for lunch.” She paused. “I don’t know what you are. You’re not what you said you were, that much is obvious. You watch exits and you move like someone who knows how to move and you filed a client complaint last week in a way that – well.” She stopped. “I don’t know what you are.”

Freen kept looking at the room.

“But I know you’d burn this city down before you let anything happen to her,” Irin said.

The room went on around them. Conversations and laughter and the clink of glasses and the professional warmth of people who spent their lives arguing and chose, at these events, to be pleasant about it.

Freen said nothing.

Irin looked at her for a long moment.

“Good,” she said.

She walked away.

—

Freen stood at the window.

She drank some of her drink. It was good – something with lime, she hadn’t paid attention when she picked it up. She looked at the room.

Becky was with a group now. Four people, some kind of conversation about a recent ruling, Becky saying something that made two of them laugh. She was completely at ease. This was her room – these were her people, her language, her world. She moved through it the way she moved through the courtroom. Like she belonged.

She did belong.

Freen watched her.

She thought about what Irin had said. Burn this city down. She turned the words over. They were accurate in the way that simple true things were accurate – not dramatic, just correct. She would. Without hesitation. Without a second thought.

She had known this for a while. She had been not examining it for a while. It sat in the same place as the notebook and the photograph and the line she had written and closed and not looked at again.

She looked at Becky across the room.

Becky was laughing at something now – the real one, the unguarded one, head tilted slightly, completely unselfconscious. The one Freen had seen for the first time across the office weeks ago and had not been able to stop thinking about since.

She told herself she was not thinking about burning cities.

She was thinking about it constantly.

She drank the rest of her lime drink and set the glass on the windowsill and looked at the entrance. Clear. She looked at the side door. Clear. She looked at the table near the back where two men she didn’t recognise had been sitting for forty minutes without talking to anyone.

She moved.

—

The two men were not threats.

One was a property lawyer from Chiang Mai attending his first Bangkok event, nervous and sitting with a colleague who was trying to help him look less nervous. Freen established this in four minutes of proximity and one brief friendly exchange and filed them under *not relevant* and went back to her window.

Becky was in a different part of the room now. She was with Noey and one of the associates, a smaller group, more relaxed. Noey was saying something and Becky was listening with the specific expression she used when she found something genuinely funny but hadn’t laughed yet.

Then she laughed.

Freen was looking at the entrance.

She looked at the entrance for another moment and then she looked at Becky and then she looked at the entrance again.

The entrance was fine.

She looked at her empty glass.

—

At ten Becky started her goodbyes.

She was efficient about it – the way she was efficient about everything, the right words to the right people, warm and brief. Freen watched the circuit of it and began her own movement toward the exit, the natural drift of someone heading out at the same time.

In the corridor outside Irin appeared beside Becky.

They said something to each other – brief, private, the shorthand of a long friendship. Irin glanced at Freen. Becky did not glance at Freen. Irin said something else and Becky made a face that meant she had heard something she was pretending she hadn’t heard and Irin smiled and hugged her and left.

Becky walked toward the exit.

Freen fell into step beside her.

They went through the hotel lobby in silence. The doorman held the door. Outside the night was warm and loud – the Wireless Road traffic, a group of people arriving for something, the ordinary Friday night city.

A cab was already at the kerb. Becky’s – she had pre-booked it, Freen had noted the confirmation on the shared calendar.

Becky stopped at the door.

She looked at Freen.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. Professionally correct. The right temperature.

“Of course,” Freen said.

Becky looked at her for one more second. In her expression something moved – brief, behind the professional surface, there and gone. She got into the cab.

The door closed.

Freen stood on the pavement and watched the cab pull into the Friday traffic.

She stood there for a moment.

Then she turned and walked to where she had parked and got in her car and sat.

She thought about burn this city down. She thought about the real laugh across the room and knowing exactly where someone was without looking at them. She thought about the one second in the cab door and what had moved behind the professional surface.

She picked up the notebook from the passenger seat.

She opened it.

The line she had written last Friday was there. She read it. She turned to a fresh page.

She didn’t write anything.

She closed it and started the car and went home.

—

Becky sat in the back of the cab and looked at the city going past.

She had not looked at Freen once at the event.

She knew where she had been the whole time.

She knew when she moved to the back of the room and why – two men who turned out to be nothing, she had watched Freen establish this in real time from across the room and had understood what she was doing and had kept her conversation going without missing a beat and nobody around her had noticed anything.

She thought about what Irin had said in the corridor.

She’s not looking at you the way someone looks at a job.

Becky had said: “Irin.”

Irin had said: “I’m just telling you what I see.”

Becky looked at the city outside.

Ten days.

She had ten days until the closing arguments and then the case would be done and the chapter would close and whatever was in the box she had put things in would either stay there or it wouldn’t.

Ten days.

She looked at the city and did not think about the window and the drink and the dark blazer and knowing exactly where someone was without looking at them.

She thought about it the whole way home.