I Sent Him Fake Proof and Won novel · Chapter 2 of 3

Chapter 2: The Studio Above the Noodle Shop

Vivienne brings news of Stellan's takeover to Zhu, who listens, pours scotch, and shows her a proxy letter bearing a woman's signature she does not recognize, and as she leaves he confirms the loop is a woman's hand.

Zhu was mid-argument with a contractor when I walked in, one paint-stained hand jabbing at a blueprint while the other held a phone to his ear. He didn't stop talking. He just gestured at the coffee pot on the filing cabinet and kept going in Cantonese, something about load-bearing walls and a deadline that was not his problem.

I poured the coffee. My hands were still steady. I had not slept, and my hands were still steady, and that was the part that kept circling back to me like a loose thread I couldn't stop pulling. It should have meant something that I was not shaking. It meant I had already passed through the part where I shook.

Zhu hung up and threw the phone onto the desk. Then he looked at me.

'You look like you lost a war,' he said. 'Tell me everything.'

I sat in my usual chair, the one with the broken spring that had memorized my weight over three years of late nights. The studio smelled like ink and old coffee and the garlic from the Vietnamese restaurant downstairs. It was the only place in London that still smelled like mine.

'Stellan is home,' I said.

'Your very expensive mistake,' Zhu said. He pulled a stool over and sat down across from me, close enough that I could see the pencil shavings in his hair. 'I gathered that from the fact that you look like you haven't slept and you're drinking my coffee at nine in the morning. What did he do?'

'He waived the dissolution clause.'

Zhu went very still. Then he said, 'That was your exit.'

'It was never my exit. It was his insurance.' I heard myself say it in Stellan's voice, flat and precise, and I hated that. 'He's been buying up everything through a shell company. My debts. My office lease. My client relationships. For eight months of silence, he's been building a cage around me and I didn't see it.'

Zhu didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he reached over and took the coffee cup out of my hand and set it on the floor.

'Start from the top,' he said. 'Everything you know. Everything you suspect. Every document he showed you.'

So I told him. I told him about the folder on the marble counter, the balance sheet, the single word in Stellan's sharp handwriting. I told him about the shell company's name, which I had read three times in the dark and could still see when I closed my eyes. I told him about Audrey Lim, who had secured the clause with zero fees as a personal favor, and who had not returned my call this morning.

I told him about the photograph I had sent. The one with the man's hand on my waist, my head tipped back, my smile bright and fake as a storefront mannequin. I had staged it in a bar in Soho with an actor from a friend's gallery opening, paid him two hundred pounds in cash, and deleted every message that could tie me to the booking. I had thought it was the smartest thing I had ever done.

'You sent him a photo of yourself with another man,' Zhu said when I finished. 'To make him sign.'

'Yes.'

'And instead of signing, he flew home overnight, cancelled every exit clause, and moved into the penthouse with you.'

'Yes.'

Zhu let out a long breath. 'So he called your bluff. In the most expensive way possible.'

'He didn't call my bluff,' I said. 'He ignored it. He didn't even mention the photograph. He just showed me the balance sheet and told me the dissolution clause was void. Like he was correcting a typo.'

Zhu listened the way he always did, which was to say he didn't interrupt and he didn't look away and he didn't try to make me feel better. When I finished, he stood up and walked to the filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of something amber from behind the rolled-up drawings.

'It's nine in the morning,' I said.

'It's after a war,' he said. He poured two fingers into a chipped mug and pushed it toward me. 'You don't have to drink it. But you should hold it. It helps.'

I held it. He was right. It helped.

'You're the best structural eye I've ever worked beside,' he said. He said it the way he always did, in front of clients and in front of nobody, like it was a fact about the weather. 'So look at the structure. He didn't buy your debts to hurt you. He bought them to make it impossible for you to leave. That's not a man who wants you gone. That's a man who wants you to stay.'

'That's supposed to make me feel better?'

'It's supposed to make you think,' Zhu said. 'Because a man who wants you to stay is a man who can be negotiated with. And you are the best negotiator I know.'

'He doesn't negotiate,' I said. 'He absorbs. The folder on the counter wasn't an opening offer. It was a statement of ownership. He didn't fly home to talk to me. He flew home to show me I had nowhere to go.'

'Then why show you at all?' Zhu asked. 'Why not just keep buying quietly? Why come home and put the documents in front of you if he wanted you to keep not knowing?'

I opened my mouth and closed it.

'Because he wanted you to know,' Zhu said. 'That's the part you keep missing. He wanted you to see it. He wanted to watch you read it. A man who wants you trapped doesn't show you the trap. A man who wants you to stay shows you the door is locked and then waits to see what you do next.'

I turned the mug in my hands. The amber liquid moved against the chipped rim and I watched it instead of looking at him.

'What I do next is find out how much of my life he actually owns,' I said. 'And then I take it back.'

Zhu was already pulling a stack of papers toward him, flipping through them with the quick, careless competence of someone who had been doing this for twenty years.

'What's that?' I asked.

'The file on the shell company,' he said. 'I pulled it this morning while you were on your way over. I figured you'd need it.'

I stared at him. 'How did you know?'

'Because you called me at six in the morning and asked if you could come over, and you never call before noon unless something has gone very wrong.' He didn't look up. 'And because I've been waiting for Stellan to make his move since the day you signed that contract. The man doesn't do anything by accident.'

He slid a sheet of paper across the desk toward me. It was a copy of a proxy letter, the kind that gets filed with the registry when a shell company changes its authorized signatory. The letterhead was the shell company's name, the one Stellan had shown me on the balance sheet. And at the bottom, above the typed name of the signatory, was a signature.

It was a looping, elaborate thing, the kind of signature someone practices in the margins of notebooks. The capital letter at the start was a P, drawn with a flourish, and the tail of it cut sharp to the right like a blade.

'Who is this?' I asked.

'That's the interesting part,' Zhu said. 'I don't know. But I've seen Stellan's filings before. His counsel is a man named Edmund Tse, and Edmund Tse signs like a doctor on a prescription pad. Three quick strokes, completely illegible. This is not Edmund Tse.'

I looked at the signature again. The P with the sharp tail. It meant nothing to me, and the fact that it meant nothing to me was the first thing all morning that felt like a door opening instead of a door closing.

'Keep the shell company's name out of any written record,' I said. 'Anything you've pulled, anything you've noted. I don't want a paper trail that leads back to this conversation.'

Zhu raised an eyebrow. 'You think he's watching?'

'I think he's been watching for eight months and I didn't notice.' I folded the proxy letter and slipped it into my coat pocket. 'I have an old contact at the registry. She owes me a favor. I want to run this past her before Stellan knows I've seen it.'

Zhu nodded slowly. 'And what am I supposed to do with the rest of this file?'

'Keep it somewhere he can't find it.'

'He's a billionaire, Vivienne. He can find anything.'

'Then keep it somewhere he won't think to look.' I stood up and put the coffee mug back on the filing cabinet. The amber liquid was untouched. 'The studio above a noodle shop is probably safe. He doesn't know it exists.'

Zhu laughed, a short, warm sound. 'He knows it exists. He just doesn't think it matters. That's the advantage of being underestimated.'

I was at the door when he called after me.

'Vivienne.'

I turned.

'That proxy letter isn't from Stellan's counsel,' he said. 'I've seen his filings. That loop is a woman's hand.'

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