“I know,” said Renee. “I’m not worried aboutthat.”
“How was it?” he said. “With Andrew.”
“Oh. Fine,” said Renee. “He was kind of a creep. But it wasn’t as bad as I feared. He’s married with a kid now. He showed me baby photos.” She settled back in her chair, sagging a little. “Hopefully I won’t have to spend much time working with him. I’m sure he mostly supervises the people doing the actual work. His staff seem nice enough.”
She was probably right. Freshview’s employees would be people with bills to pay and families to support, doing their best to get along. Ket Siong was in no position to judge their choices.
The smells of the restaurant had gone from enticing to oppressive. The black walls felt like they were closing in. He took a shallow breath, tamping down on a surge of nausea.
“Ket Siong.” Renee’s face was concerned. “Are you OK?”
The waitress came to take their order before he had to answer. Ket Siong was glad of the reprieve. It gave him a few moments to think about what he should say.
He had no evidence regarding Freshview’s role in what had happened to Stephen. But Renee wasn’t a judge sitting in court. He didn’t need to prove his suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. Surely anyone, hearing what he knew, would have reservations about doing business with Freshview.
He had to tell her. Ten years ago, he’d broken her heart, and his own, in part because he hadn’t trusted her with the truth.
He’d always wished there had been something else he could have done. Well, here he was again, knowing something Reneedidn’t about her family and his own. He could do something different, this time. He could decide to trust her.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
Her eyes flicked up. There was a question in them, one Ket Siong would have liked to answer. “Yes?”
Ket Siong felt a sudden overwhelming surge of protectiveness. He wanted to stand between Renee and anything that might hurt her—including himself. It would be so easy to be quiet, change the subject, tell her something different. Something she wanted to hear.
Curiously, it was not Stephen he thought of then, or Ket Hau, or their mother. It was Clarissa Low whose face appeared before him. Her expression when he’d said to her,Maybe it’s time you started asking.
“You’ve never asked why my family came to the UK,” he said.
Renee blinked. She looked away, smiling wryly, as though she was laughing at herself. He knew she felt foolish.
Before he could say anything else, their ramen arrived—bowls of noodles coiled in cloudy broth beneath slices of pork belly and generous shavings of black fungus and spring onions, a large square of nori tucked in at the side of the bowl.
Ket Siong had been hungry when he arrived, but his appetite had vanished.
When he looked up, Renee’s habitual poise was back in place.
“I didn’t like to pry,” she said, as though there had been no interruption. “People have different reasons for moving.”
“We weren’t thinking of migrating originally,” said Ket Siong. “My mother didn’t want to leave my father. We used to visit him in the columbarium every few months. And… it was her home. She wanted to make it better.”
“Why’d you change your mind?”
“It was to do with my brother’s job,” said Ket Siong. “He used to work for an NGO in KL, it did a lot of work with partners in Sarawak. He got involved in a campaign trying to tackle logging on native customary land in Ensengei, in Sarawak. They were supporting the villagers in a lawsuit against the company doing it.”
Renee’s eyes widened. “That’s terrible.”
Ket Siong couldn’t look at her, or he wasn’t going to be able to keep speaking. She’d worked so hard on this pitch to Freshview. So much rode on it for her.
“Yes,” he said. “My brother’s co-worker Stephen was involved in the same campaign.” He swallowed. “He got kidnapped.”
“The co-worker?” Renee sat up. “Oh my God. What happened?”
Why had he called Stephen a co-worker? It was hard to explain all Stephen had been to the family, even if he avoided mentioning his suspicions about the nature of Stephen’s relationship with his brother.
It was easy to trot out the excuses, harder to fool himself. Ket Siong knew the reason. He didn’t want to make this worse for Renee than it was already going to be.
Though who was he really trying to protect? Was he trying to minimise Renee’s upset for her sake, or his own? She had already invested so much in the pitch to Freshview. Bound up in this deal was everything her family meant to her, all she’d ever wanted from them and failed to get. How much could he mean to her, compared to that?
