Except shedidn’twant him to be into her. Fed up with herself, Renee put her phone screen-down on the coffee table and turned back to her computer. Her lawyer had sent through a thirty-page updated HR policy for Virtu last week, which she’d been procrastinating on looking at. She opened the file and dived in.
Six p.m. came on Monday with no word from Su Khoon, but Renee turned up at the Chelsea house anyway. He had to come back there to sleep sometime. He wouldn’t be staying anywhere else. Dad kept a tight leash on her brothers when it came to business expenses, after the Hong Kong junk party drama of 2011, and Su Khoon was too cheap to spend his own money on a hotel.
She still had the keys to the house, though it had taken somehunting to find them, nestled in the depths of a drawer in her bedroom. There was a black Merc parked on the road outside the house when she arrived—probably her brother’s hire car; he preferred to drive in London. That must mean he was home.
She climbed up the short flight of stairs leading to the front door, feeling slightly sick.
But nothing happened when she rang the doorbell. The place felt empty when she finally let herself in.
“Er Ge?” she said, and heard her voice echo.
She was going to have to wait. Well, that was fine. She could use the time to knock some emails on the head.
Instead of working, though, Renee found herself wandering around the house, inspecting it like a visitor to an architectural curiosity. It had been years since she’d last been here. It was meticulously clean, with the unnatural quiet of a house that wasn’t lived in.
There were signs of her brother’s occupation. A pair of trainers on the shoe rack in the hallway. A jacket slung over the back of a sofa. In the ground floor reception room, a bowl on the coffee table filled with apples, pears, oranges, and a banana, supplied by the housekeeping service the family used when they visited.
The pears were the yellow Chinese ones, because Dad liked them. Renee picked up a pear, polished it on her blouse and bit into it.
It was unnerving how little the place had changed. The house had last been redecorated in the mid-noughties, by someone who’d apparently had instructions to make it look as much like a corporate law firm as possible. The walls were dead white, and there was a lot of dark wood and black glass, set off by pristine white upholstery.
Renee came to a stop in front of a large family portrait hanging above the fireplace in the reception room. It had been taken when her eldest brother, Su Beng, had started his undergraduatedegree at Royal Holloway. They’d all come over from Singapore for a holiday.
Renee was eight, remote and faintly disapproving in a sequined silver cardigan over a tulle dress. The sight of the outfit spread a ghost itch over her thighs: the underskirt had tormented her, and the black Mary Janes chafed.
Her brothers were in suits, looking solemn and unformed. Like kids. It was hard to see in their faces the towering bullies she remembered.
But she was most struck by her mother. Mom wouldn’t even have been forty yet—she’d married at nineteen and had Su Beng a year later—and she looked startlingly young to Renee’s eyes. There was a careful distance between her and Dad, Mom’s body angled away from him, her expression guarded.
It was a strange picture. No one was touching anyone, except for Dad, who had his hand on Renee’s shoulder.
In a way, the relationship between the two of them had always been the least complicated. Su Beng and Su Khoon had run scared of their father, but he’d been different with his daughter—whether that was due to guilt over her unpropitious entry into the world, or simply because he’d had lower expectations of her, as a girl. He’d been a benign if detached parent to Renee, giving her mints and asking about school during his infrequent appearances in her day-to-day life.
It had all gone wrong in the end, when Renee had proved incapable of living up even to the unexacting standards he had for her. Now she had a chance to finally be the daughter he wanted. She just needed to not mess it up.
The rattle of a key unlocking the front door echoed down the hallway, followed by a woman’s low laugh.
Renee had set her half-eaten pear down on the coffee table and turned to greet her brother, but she pulled up short. For a moment, she thought, absurdly, that someone had broken in.Then she heard Su Khoon’s voice, murmuring, and the woman squealed.
“Ohgross,” said Renee aloud.
Clearly she didn’t speak up enough, because they stumbled into the room before she could call out to stop them. It was her brother, entangled—predictably—with a blonde woman in a tiny green bodycon dress and vertiginous black heels. Thankfully, Su Khoon was fully clothed, though Renee would happily have lived without experiencing the sight of him with his tongue down a woman’s throat.
Unbelievable that he couldn’t bring himself to splash out on a hotel for this. There were pictures of Su Khoon’s wife, Jessie, and their kids plastered all over the room. Not to mention a huge image from his pre-wedding shoot in his bedroom, right above the headboard. Had he been planning on sleeping with this woman right under that picture of him and Jessie frolicking on a beach in full wedding attire? Why were Renee’s brothers soembarrassing?
She would have preferred to be pretty much anywhere else in the world, but it couldn’t be helped. Renee squared her shoulders and said:
“Do you not check your phone or what?”
The effect was instantaneous and entertaining, if Renee had been in the mood to be amused.
Su Khoon leapt back like he’d been scalded. “Shit!”
Renee could smell the alcohol on his breath from where she was standing. She suppressed a grimace.
The blonde woman whirled around, blanching when her eyes met Renee’s. “Oh my God! You are the wife.”
“Don’t worry, I’m just his sister,” said Renee. “That’s his wife there, in that picture on the sideboard. Third from the left.”
