Page 71 of The Friend Zone Experiment

Socialising with bloody Andrew Yeoh was the last thing Renee wanted to do. But she should have known this was going to have to happen, from the moment she saw him in the Savoy. Pitching wasn’t just about pricing or explaining how you were best placed to meet the counterparty’s needs. It was about relationships.

Courting the Freshview team like this was absolutely the right thing for Su Khoon to be doing. If Renee wanted to stay in the game, she was going to have to do it, too… or let herself be pushed out.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m always pleasant.” She smiled. “Where are we going?”

If she had to grin and bear Andrew in order to win, she would do it. At least it was a problem with a clear end date. Either one of her brothers would become CEO of Chahaya, and she could go back to forgetting about Andrew’s existence. Or she’d get the job, and—she’d figure out a workaround somehow. Surely she could delegate dealing with Andrew to somebody else.

It became evident, over the next few days, that there were other dilemmas she wouldn’t be able to resolve so easily, if she won the contest her father had set them. It was impossible to do any kind of decent job with Virtu, while giving the Freshview pitch the attention Su Khoon—and Dad—expected.

That was fine for now. Her business wouldn’t sink from a mere fortnight’s neglect. But if Chahaya were to become Renee’s full-time job, she was going to have to make some tough decisions about Virtu.

But that was a problem for future Renee to worry about. The Renee of the present day was, fortunately, too busy to think too hard about things that might not come to pass.

Since having therapy a few years ago, she’d tried to change her approach to work. She didn’t let her staff stay late at the office and she tried to be as strict with herself as she was with them. But there was something freeing about letting go of that hard-won discipline, succumbing to the siren call of the crunch.

She’d forgotten howgoodit felt—spending late nights hunched over her laptop, surrounded by discarded takeaway sushi boxes and coffee cups. Everything else fell away. Her eyes burned and her back ached, but at the same time she felt electric, alive, running high on adrenaline.

How much of her exhilaration could be attributed to the fact most of her breaks from work involved either texting Ket Siong or catching up on his texts was one of the many things she was avoiding thinking about, with the skill of long practice. Nathalie would have pulled her up on it—so Renee hadn’t told her.

Why shouldn’t she text Ket Siong, anyway? There was nothing damning in the content of their exchanges. She could have shared any of them with her parents, without a blush. Ket Siong sent her links to long reads about art, culture, and science; she contributed memes, Instagram reels, and gossip about people he didn’t know.

She didn’t mention the unwelcome reappearance of Andrew in her life. But she did tell Ket Siong that Felicia Handoko had expended a portion of the Delima Corp millions on hiring Michael Learns to Rock to perform at her wedding.

A patron of the arts,he replied, startling a laugh out of Renee while she was engaged in a cheeky under-the-desk phone scroll during one of Su Khoon’s endless meetings.

They never texted about anything personal. The closest they got was when, unexpectedly, Ket Siong sent her a video of a piano being played. There was no accompanying message. The pianist’sface couldn’t be seen, only his hands on the keyboard—but Renee recognised them.

She’d avoided asking about his career, though she hadn’t been able to resist sending him that link to the music competition. It was clear something had happened in the past few years, if he’d gone from headlining concerts in Hong Kong—the event web page was the top Google search result for his name, four years on—to teaching kids scales. But natural as it was to confide in Ket Siong, he had a reserve that made it difficult to question him about himself in return.

The video felt meaningful. He was playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major, one of the few pieces of classical music Renee was able to identify.

That’s beautiful.

Then, as if she hadn’t known it from the first few notes:

That’s Mozart’s Sonata facile, isn’t it? The one you taught me at Nathalie’s party.

Thanks. Yes. I wasn’t sure if you’d know it.

I have a good memory when it comes to you,Renee typed out, before she got ahold of herself and wiped the draft.

At some point she was going to have to come clean to Nathalie about the fact she was texting Ket Siong. She’d only managed to avoid it so far because they were both so busy. Nathalie would no doubt demand to see the messages.

Renee was of course aware she had a right to privacy. She was perfectly capable of telling Nathalie so. But still, it was not out of the realms of possibility that Renee might show the messages to her, in a moment of weakness.

Either way, it would be nice to have a clean conscience when she assured Nathalie nothing was going on.

I love Mozart, she said instead, and put her phone down, turning back to the report she was trying to digest on Chahaya’s construction capabilities.

She started rereading the paragraph on earned value management that had made her bail in the first place when the phone buzzed. She read the message, felt the blood rush to her face, and put her head down on her desk, pressing her hot cheek to the grateful chill of its surface.

I remember.

Which was a normal thing for Ket Siong to say. Staring at the small hill of Graze snack packets that had accumulated on her desk over the past week or so, Renee was forced to admit that it was she who was not being normal. It was the caffeine, and the pressure of this pitch, and being forced into proximity with her family, who were the single greatest risk factor for her mental health that she had yet identified.

Nothing was going on. There was nothing to worry about. But maybe she wouldn’t mention the messages to Nathalie after all.

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