[Mean Dokrak's POV]
I was in the middle of telling Nat — my husband, the love of my life, the man who once cried at a mobile phone advertisement — that his pasta was overcooked, when my phone buzzed.
A news alert. Lawson & Co. trending on a local business forum.
"Ice Queen Strikes Again — Two Employees Terminated for Workplace Romance."
I set my fork down.
"She did it again," I said.
Nat looked up from his tragically mushy pasta. "Becky?"
"Who else."
He had the expression he always got when Becky came up — a kind of fond, resigned sympathy, like a man watching someone walk slowly toward a wall they'd already walked into seventeen times. He had never met a woman more determined to be alone than my best friend, and after eleven years of marriage to me he had heard enough about her to write a biography.
"Is she okay?" he asked.
"She thinks she is." I was already typing. "That's always the problem."
I sent her three messages. I called twice. I received nothing — which told me everything, because Becky not responding to me was Becky's version of distress signalling.
I put on my shoes.
"You're going?" Nat said.
"She fired two people for being in love, Nat. On the same day that woman messaged her." I picked up my bag. "She needs rice soup and someone who isn't afraid of her."
He pointed at the stove. "Take the —"
"Already planned."
He smiled at his pasta. "Tell her I said hello."
"She'll pretend she doesn't care."
"I know. Tell her anyway."
[Narrator's POV]
Becky opened the door before Mean could knock a third time.
She looked at her. Then at the bags. Then back at her with the expression of a woman assembling a response that would sound like annoyance and function as relief.
"It's nine o'clock," Becky said.
"The rice place on Rama IV is open until ten." Mean held up the bags. "Also you didn't answer my calls."
"I was busy."
"You were sitting in the dark with that cat."
A pause.
"The lamp was on," Becky said.
Mean walked in.
[Mean Dokrak's POV]
She hadn't eaten. I could tell immediately — the kitchen was too clean, the kind of clean that meant nothing had been touched since morning. Becky when she was fine cooked elaborate things she pretended were simple. Becky when she was not fine drank black coffee and called it dinner and believed nobody noticed.
I noticed.
I set up the food while she stood at the counter watching me with that expression — arms crossed, chin slightly up — that she had been perfecting since the third grade and which had never once succeeded in making me feel unwelcome.
"Nat says hello," I said.
"Mm."
"He overcooked the pasta again."
"He always overcooks the pasta."
"I know. I keep telling him. He keeps watching those videos online." I opened a container. "Sit down, Becky."
She sat. Hed materialised immediately onto her lap with the urgency of a creature who had been waiting for a lap all evening. She put one hand on him automatically — that absent, unconscious gesture that was the most unguarded thing about her.
We ate in the comfortable silence of people who had shared enough meals to not need to fill every one with words.
Then her phone lit up on the table.
One notification. Brief. I saw the initial before she turned it face-down.
L.
I looked at my rice soup.
Becky looked at her rice soup.
Neither of us said anything.
But I felt the atmosphere in the room shift — the way it always shifted when Uesy entered it, even as just a letter on a screen. Something in Becky went very still. The particular stillness of someone holding something carefully so it won't spill.
"Good soup," I said.
"It's always good soup," she said.
"Mm."
I did not push. Not tonight. Tonight she needed food and quiet and the company of someone who asked nothing from her.
Tomorrow, if she still hadn't opened it, I was going to ask everything.
But tonight — soup.
Hed purred. The city hummed. Becky sat with a secret she wasn't ready to open and I sat beside her the way I had been sitting beside her since we were seven years old.
Some things do not require explanation.
They just require showing up.