Page Four
1756 Words
She knew before she opened the door.
Not a feeling something more specific than that. The apartment had a particular quality of silence when it was empty, the kind of quiet that had a shape she'd memorized in four days without realizing she was memorizing it. This silence was different. Occupied. The way a room felt after someone had been in it and left not the absence of a person but the recent presence of one, something in the air that hadn't settled yet.
Dwi stood in the doorway for three seconds.
Then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her and stood with her back against it and looked at the room.
Everything was where she'd left it. The notepad on the kitchen counter. The water glass by the sink. The shoes she'd almost worn last night pushed to one side of the entryway. Nothing moved. Nothing disturbed.
The study door was open. She had closed it this morning.
She crossed the living room and stepped into the study and saw it immediately a single page on the keyboard of her laptop, placed there precisely, not slid under the door or folded into an envelope but set down flat like a document being delivered to a desk. Like someone who knew exactly where she worked and wanted her to find it the moment she sat down.
She didn't touch it yet. She looked at it from standing distance and read what she could.
It was typed. Same font, same formatting as the rest of Schedule B. Page four the header confirmed it, the same page numbering she'd noted in the incomplete version but she could see from standing that it was longer than what she'd imagined filling a single page gap. Single-spaced. Dense.
She pulled out her phone and photographed it before she touched it, the way Sari's lawyer cousin had told her to photograph anything that appeared in her possession unexpectedly. Then she sat down, put on the nitrile gloves she'd bought on Tuesday for reasons she hadn't been able to fully articulate at the time, and picked it up.
She read it four times.
The first time fast, for the shape of it.
The second time slowly, for the specific language.
The third time with her original Schedule B printout beside it, comparing clause by clause.
The fourth time she stopped halfway through and put it down and sat back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the kind of person who designed something like this and what they were afraid of.
The clause Mira had started to describe in the event the contracted party discovers information pertaining to Harton Group operations, personnel, or strategies classified above clearance level three, the contracted party agrees to immediate transfer to continued, in the version she'd been sent originally, with language about a secondary residential arrangement and a confidentiality extension of not less than five years.
In the version on her desk, it continued differently.
The contracted party agrees to immediate transfer to the custody of designated Harton Group legal representation, pending review of the nature and extent of information accessed. The review period shall not exceed ninety days. During the review period, the contracted party's movements, communications, and external contacts shall be subject to restriction as determined by Harton Group legal counsel.
Custody.
Not accommodation. Not residence. Custody.
She read the word again to make sure she was reading it correctly. She was.
The clause went on for two more paragraphs, increasingly specific about what restriction of communications meant no contact with parties outside the Harton Group network without written authorization, no access to personal devices except as supervised, no legal representation except through counsel pre-approved by and here, in both versions, the same name appeared.
As determined by Ms. J. Park, senior legal counsel, Harton Group.
Dwi put the page down.
She sat very still for a long time.
Then she picked up her phone and called Mira.
It rang five times and went to voicemail, which told her either Mira was busy or Mira had seen the name on the screen and made a decision. She tried twice more. Same result.
She tried Sari instead.
"I need that lawyer cousin of yours," she said, when Sari picked up. "Today. Tonight if possible."
"Dwi, it's six"
"I know what time it is. Please."
A pause. Sari had known her long enough to hear the register her voice was in not panic, something quieter and more specific than panic, the tone she got when something was real and she'd finished pretending it wasn't.
"I'll call him now," Sari said. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Dwi said. "I'm completely fine."
She hung up and looked at the page four on her desk and thought about the word custody and about Ms. Park sitting across from her in the boardroom this morning with her leather portfolio and her specific stillness, and about Lay saying she was my father's legal counsel in the tone he used when he was giving information and withholding the part that mattered.
She thought about one more thing.
She opened her laptop and pulled up the Harton Group portal the clean, slate-grey interface they'd given her access to on Friday. Employee directory. She searched Park. Three results. She clicked the first one.
Ms. Jiyeon Park. Senior Legal Counsel. Harton Group Singapore. Appointed: 2019. Reporting to: Board of Directors.
Not to Lay. To the board.
She clicked back and searched for the org chart.
The board of directors had seven members. She scrolled through the names. Four she didn't recognize. One she knew from the financial press a Singaporean industrialist who appeared in Forbes lists. One was listed simply as Investor Representative, TWL Group.
TWL Group.
Tan Wei Liang.
She sat with that for a moment. Wei Liang was on Lay's board. Wei Liang who had asked about Dubai. Wei Liang who had looked at all four of them at the dinner like he was confirming an inventory. Wei Liang who had a grey-haired lawyer sitting across from Dwi in a meeting this morning a lawyer who reported not to Lay but to a board that Wei Liang sat on.
She looked at the page four in front of her. At the word custody. At the name Ms. J. Park.
Someone had sent her the real version of page four. Not the restricted version. The actual one, with the actual language, the clause that explained what happened to contracted parties who found out too much. Someone had put it on her keyboard while she was in a boardroom being evaluated by the people who had written it.
There were two reasons to do that.
The first: to warn her. Someone on the inside who wanted her to know what she was in.
The second: to see what she did with it. To test whether she would go to Lay, go to a lawyer, try to run and to observe the response, whichever one it was, and use it for something.
She didn't know yet which one this was. She suspected she needed to figure that out before she did anything else.
She heard the elevator.
Not the main elevator the other one. The one behind the door with the biometric lock. The one that came from his floor.
She had approximately four seconds.
She turned the page four face down on the desk, put her original Schedule B printout on top of it, and opened a random document on her laptop. Then she stood up and moved to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and was standing at the counter drinking it when the door opened.
Lay came in the way he always came in like the room had been expecting him, like his own access to her space was a fact he'd never thought to question. He was still in the suit from the meeting, jacket on, no concession to the end of the working day.
He stopped when he saw her. Looked at the glass of water. Looked at her face.
"You're home early," he said.
"It's six thirty," she said.
"You're usually in the study."
She looked at him over the rim of the glass. "Took a break."
He crossed to the kitchen without being invited which was, she reminded herself, his house, his floor, his elevator, and therefore his kitchen in all the ways that mattered legally and poured himself a glass of water from the same jug, which struck her as strange only because nothing about Lay ever seemed incidental.
"The meeting went well," he said.
"You were there."
"Wei Liang called me on the way down." He set his glass on the counter. "He wants you at the follow-up in three weeks. New York."
New York. Arc two, three weeks early. She filed that away.
"Is that usual?" she asked.
"Nothing about this is usual." He looked at her. "You know that."
She set her glass down. "Lay."
"Mm."
"If I found something something that wasn't meant for me what would you do?"
The quality of the silence changed.
He looked at her with the full attention the gaze that didn't move, didn't recalculate, just landed and stayed. She had learned in five days that this was what he looked like when something mattered.
"What did you find?" he said.
"I asked what you would do."
Three seconds. Four.
"It depends," he said carefully, "on what it was."
"On whether you'd invoke clause twelve, or something else in the contract?"
His jaw moved. The slight tightening she'd started to recognize. "Dwi"
"Or on whether you'd call Ms. Park?"
The name landed in the room like something thrown hard against glass she saw the impact in him, saw the thing behind his eyes that wasn't surprise but was close to it, the recalculation running faster than he wanted it to.
He said nothing for a long moment.
"How do you know that name?" he said.
She picked up her glass. Drank. Put it down.
"I'll see you at dinner," she said.
She walked back to the study and closed the door and stood on the other side of it with her heart going faster than she wanted it to and her hand still steady, which she counted as a win.
From the other side of the door she heard nothing.
Then she heard the elevator.
Then she heard it go up.
She sat down at her desk, turned page four back over, and started writing.
- Writer
