Chapter 14
14
The sun shone through the blinds, suffusing Renee’s bedroom with a warm golden glow reminiscent of home. There were strong arms wrapped around her, a familiar voice whispering in her ear, tender and low.
The voice was explaining that he loved her. He’d only hurt her by accident, a mistake, easily explained away. For once he spoke, at length, and she was content to listen.
The dream shattered when Renee opened her eyes. She woke up all the way and remembered everything that had happened the day before. Going to the National Gallery and finding Jason there.
It was like plunging into cold water. Renee stiffened all over. Rage and shame churned inside her. She’d managed to escape them for most of yesterday and the night before, but she couldn’t run forever. But—
“I won,” she said aloud. She gritted her teeth and got out of bed.
A few hours later, she was the possessor of the newest iPhone in rose gold, as well as a new SIM card. She could unblock her brother on her existing number, but that was the number she used to send voice notes to Nathalie and speak to her staff, the number she’d given Ket Siong.
Su Khoon could have a different number. She texted him straight away, to prevent herself putting it off.
Hi Er Ge, it’s Renee. I want to discuss your offer. I can come to the house tomorrow. 6 pm OK?
Getting to the family’s townhouse in Chelsea by six would entail leaving the office earlier than usual, but Renee didn’t want to risk getting stuck there with her brother late at night. She didn’t feel great about going to the house, but they’d need somewhere private to talk, and there was no way she was letting him in her office again.
At least the house wasn’t Su Khoon’s. Dad owned it. Sometimes, on their occasional calls, he’d remind her that the house was for the whole family and she was welcome to use it. It was probably his way of making himself feel better about the fact that Renee had run halfway around the world to get away from the family.
So much for keeping her distance. If she was going to win Chahaya, she’d have to let her family back into her life. But that was good, wasn’t it? She’d had her ups and downs with them, but they did care about her—Dad did, anyway. Sure, he’d made mistakes, but nobody was perfect. He was the only father she had, and he’d reached out to her. It had to be the right thing to do, to reach back.
Renee was jumpy all day, checking her phone every five minutes for a reply from her brother.
Though she’d recently adopted a resolution to take proper weekends off work, she ended up working, purely for the distraction. She didn’t have many other resources. A hopeful text to Nathalie in the morning was answered four hours later with an image of Nathalie with her husband and son at an indoor playground, all three wearing party hats.
Nathalie captioned it, Hell on earth. But they looked happy, even if the chocolate smeared on Thomas’s chin had made it onto Nathalie’s champagne-coloured blouse.
Renee replied:
Did you really wear a silk shirt to a kid’s birthday party?
No reply. Nathalie was probably in the ball pit or breaking up a toddler fistfight. Renee found herself typing Ket Siong’s name into the WhatsApp search bar.
To her surprise, he had an actual profile picture—a photo of two boys with a grey-haired Chinese auntie dressed in samfu. The younger of the two kids, who must have been six or seven, wore a collared shirt, buttoned all the way up, and a comically serious frown. The soft-cheeked little face didn’t much resemble the Ket Siong of today, but the vibes definitely matched.
She swiped WhatsApp off her screen before she could be tempted to send a message. Though she had fond memories of texting with Ket Siong. His messages had been prompt and interesting, always impeccably punctuated.
But he wouldn’t want to hear from her now. The shame crashed over her again, suffocating. God, what must he think of her? Messy, pathetic, possessed of incredibly poor judgment and taste in men…
No, this was good. If it put Ket Siong off her, that could only be a good thing. Not that he was into her. Not the way she’d want him to be.
Except she didn’t want 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 some hunting 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 undergraduate degree 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.
“Oh gross ,” 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 so embarrassing ?
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.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” said Su Khoon, though he couldn’t really intimidate with lipstick smeared on his ear and his jacket hanging off one arm. He yanked the jacket off savagely, as though the situation was its fault.
“I texted you,” said Renee. “I’m here to negotiate.” She glanced at the blonde woman. “Should I come another time?”
Su Khoon unbent a little, scenting victory. “If you’re ready to be sensible, let’s talk.” He said to the woman, “You’d better go.”
“Oh my God, Er Ge, at least call her a cab,” said Renee.
She expected bluster. Her brothers weren’t gracious winners, and they were even worse losers.
But Su Khoon seemed unsettled by her reaction, enough that he forgot to be aggressive.
“My phone’s not working,” he said, looking mulish. “They’re getting it fixed in the morning.”
Renee managed not to roll her eyes.
“Come on, I’ll get you an Uber,” she said to the woman. “Where do you need to get to?”