Page 28 of The Friend Zone Experiment

This sounded infinitely worse, spoken out loud, than it had felt inside his head. He wished he’d come up with a lie instead.

“Ket Siong,” said his brother, in an awed whisper, “are you saying you went home with a woman?”

Ket Siong hung his head.

“I forget you’re not a kid anymore,” said Ket Hau. He let out an exhale, at a loss. “Should you be doing that kind of thing with the sister of a student?”

“What? No, it—it wasn’t her,” said Ket Siong.

“That’s something. Wait,” said Ket Hau, with growing incredulity, “you mean you really went home with someone you met at the event? A stranger?”

Ket Siong didnotwant to tell his brother about Renee. Ket Hau might ask why, exactly, Ket Siong had revived a connection he’d cut off ten years ago for good reason; whether friendship was all he wanted from Renee; and where, at the end of the day, he thought he was going with everything he’d said and done in the past twelve hours.

They were reasonable questions. Ket Siong did not feel ready to answer any of them, even to himself.

“You used, uh—you were safe, right?” said Ket Hau, with the expression of a man seriously weighing up the possibility that he might need to give his thirty-one-year-old brother an explanation of the facts of life.

Telling him about Low Teck Wee was appearing more attractive by the minute.

“There’s something else,” said Ket Siong. “I saw Low Teck Wee at the museum. Chairman of Freshview Industries.”

The clarification was unnecessary. Ket Hau was not likely to have forgotten Low Teck Wee, or anyone else connected to the Ensengei debacle. His face changed. “What do you mean, you saw him?”

“I talked to him,” Ket Siong admitted.

Ket Hau took a deep breath and let it out. “OK.”

Ket Hau was rarely genuinely angry with Ket Siong, but thenagain, this was a day of rare and unusual events. Ket Siong could practically hear his brother counting to ten in his head.

There wasn’t much space to move around in, with both of them in the room. It was a decent-sized bedroom for two to share, by London standards, but it held too much furniture, which the landlady had declined to remove. Besides their two single beds, there was a built-in wardrobe covering one wall, a desk, a chest of drawers on wheels under the desk that had an unpleasant habit of rolling over one’s feet without warning, and a large metal shelving unit.

Ket Hau sank onto his bed, avoiding banging his head on the shelving unit with the ease of practice.

Ket Siong sat on his own bed opposite. He could always be sure that he would have mercy over justice from his brother, but sometimes that was worse, somehow.

“So that’s why you wanted to go,” said Ket Hau. “I thought it was the girl.”

Ket Siong shook his head, thinking of Alicia’s pink-haired amour. “I told you she’s not interested in me.”

In other circumstances, Ket Hau wouldn’t have been able to resist interrogating him about the stranger whohadbeen interested. Now, he merely nodded.

“You said.” He paused. “What was Low Teck Wee doing at the V&A? Don’t tell me Freshview is expanding into fashion. Hardly fits with the core timber business.”

Ket Siong thought back to his conversation with the man. “Low mentioned his daughter Charmaine. The company’s a donor to the V&A.”

“That makes sense,” said Ket Hau. “That’s the other kind of money laundering. Where you use your money to wash yourself clean, buy face… What did you say to Low Teck Wee?”

He had to have some idea. Ket Siong had had nothing to do with the grassroots campaign against Freshview Industries’logging activities on native customary land in Ensengei, Sarawak. Ket Siong had only been aware of it as one of Stephen’s causes—thecause, the one closest to his heart.

Ket Hau had been involved in the campaign, too, but unlike Stephen, he wasn’t from Ensengei. The fight was, for him, more work than vocation.

Still, anything that mattered to Stephen was important to Ket Hau. They’d been best friends ever since Ket Hau had joined the NGO they both worked at. Stephen was a few years older, but they’d bonded over being Sarawakians in Kuala Lumpur, having been raised Catholic, and supporting Liverpool FC.

The first time Stephen had visited Ket Hau at home, he’d come laden with gifts for the family—Oreo layer cake and Sarawak pepper, sourced on a recent trip back east. After lunch he’d sat down with them in the living room for a cup of Nescafé, while Ma put her latest kdrama on. Stephen started by heckling the cast for their preternatural beauty (“In Korea there’s no such thing as a pimple, hah?”) and ended up staying five hours and sobbing at the finale. From then on, he’d been family.

There was only one thing Ket Siong wanted to know that Low Teck Wee might be able to tell him.

“I asked him if he knew what happened to Stephen,” said Ket Siong.

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