[Narrator's POV]
Mean Dokrak arrived at Becky's apartment on a Saturday morning the way she arrived everywhere — without sufficient warning and with food.
She had called twice and texted four times and when Becky had responded to none of these she had simply appeared at the door with two bags of khao tom from the place on Rama IV that Becky had loved since they were twelve years old and couldn't be reasonably turned away from.
This was a strategy Mean had developed over thirty years of knowing Becky Lawson. You could not reason with her. You could not out-argue her. You could not appeal to her sentimentality because she would look at you with those flat, composed eyes and wait for you to finish.
But you could feed her.
Becky opened the door in a silk robe, her hair down, reading glasses still on from whatever she'd been doing, and looked at Mean with the expression of a woman who had been interrupted mid-thought and was calculating whether the interruption was worth it.
Mean held up the bags.
Becky stepped aside.
[Mean Dokrak's POV]
I have known Becky Lawson since we were seven years old and she told the boy next door that his opinion was statistically irrelevant. She was seven. I knew then that this girl was either going to run a company or a small country and I wanted to be close enough to witness it either way.
Thirty years later, here I am.
I unpacked the khao tom at her kitchen table while she made coffee — real coffee, not the instant kind, because Becky considered instant coffee a personal failure — and Hed wove around my ankles with the affection he reserved exclusively for people who had once, accidentally, left a piece of grilled fish unattended on this very table.
"You fired two people," I said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Somkit and Pam from your office. My husband's colleague knows Somkit's wife. Small world." I arranged the containers with the care of someone who knew this meal was also a negotiation. "How do you feel?"
"I feel like someone came to my apartment uninvited on a Saturday."
"Emotionally, Becky."
She set a cup of coffee in front of me and sat down across the table with her own. She looked, without her office armour, almost like the girl I'd grown up with — the one who used to sit on the wall between our houses and read while I talked at her and pretended she wasn't listening.
She was always listening. That was the thing about Becky that most people missed. She heard everything. She simply chose very carefully what to respond to.
"I feel fine," she said.
"You fired two people for falling in love."
"I fired two people for violating a clearly stated —"
"For falling in love," I repeated pleasantly. "In your company. Which you find threatening because love in the workplace leads to distraction and —"
"Mean."
"— compromised professional judgment and also because somewhere in that complicated, magnificent, deeply repressed heart of yours you are aware that you have never once allowed yourself to —"
"Mean."
"— fall for anyone despite ample opportunity and one very specific person who —"
"Mean."
I picked up my spoon. "I'm just saying."
She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup with the expression that had made grown men reconsider their life choices in boardrooms across the city.
I have been receiving that look since 1994. It has never once worked on me.
"She messaged you," I said, more quietly now. "Didn't she."
Becky was silent.
"Eleven days ago," I said. It wasn't a question. My husband's sister followed Uesy on social media and I had my sources and Becky knew I had my sources and we had long ago reached a detente about this.
"I'm aware of when she messaged me."
"And?"
"And I haven't opened it."
I set my spoon down. I looked at my best friend — this woman I had watched build walls so high and so clean that most people assumed there was nothing behind them, not understanding that you only build walls like that when you have something extraordinary to protect.
"Becky," I said. "We are not twenty-two anymore."
Something moved across her face. Fast. Gone before I could name it.
"It was different then," she said.
"It's still different now. It will always be a little different. That's not going away." I leaned forward. "But she's still there. Eleven days later, she's still there. Do you know how rare that is? To find someone who stays after you've pushed them away?"
The apartment was quiet. Hed jumped onto Becky's lap with the timing of a creature who understood dramatic moments and wanted to be part of them.
Becky stroked his head. Once, twice. Her eyes somewhere else entirely.
"I didn't know how to be that person," she said finally. Quietly. In the voice she used only when there was no performance required. "Back then. I didn't know how to be someone who — " She stopped.
"Who loves a woman," I said gently.
"Who loves her." A pause. "Specifically."
I felt something in my chest do a complicated thing.