They get quiet the way cities get quiet before a storm, the kind of hush that makes small noises feel like secrets, and Maya drags him away from the crowd as if she can peel the world back and find the truth underneath, "Talk to me proper, not the press release version," she says, camera slung like a pistol, and Jace leans against the cafe's warped window and looks at his hands like they're strangers he hasn't trusted in years
"You want the truth," he says, voice low, not theatrical, and the steam from his coffee fogs the glass in little maps, "my father taught me to fix problems before they fixed you, we had a name to protect and he said names eat people who don't feed them back, so I learned to feed the name first"
Maya makes a face like she knows men who speak in parables, "That's very rich-boy poetry, mate, give me the nuts and bolts," and he gives her the nuts and bolts because sometimes honesty is cheaper than the lies you rehearse
"When I was ten my father made me watch a handshake, not the kind on TV, the kind in a warehouse where men made a thing disappear, a factory of small traders lost to make one product shine, he said we were building a future, and I remember a woman at the gate with a child and rain in her hair and I remember thinking if I could make a thing nobody would starve, that's what he sold me, that was the sermon," he says, and his mouth shapes the memory like a coin, he doesn't dramatize it, it lands flat on the table like a ledger
"That's awful," Maya says, quiet, not the performative outrage people do for likes, and Jace nods because awful doesn't improve with adjectives, it only collects weight
"We bought the land, closed the lane, changed the postcode, and somewhere a number of people had to move, not all of them could, one old man died of the worry, my father sent flowers, that was the first deal that tasted like ash in my mouth," he says, and the cafe noise comes back in waves as if incompetent waiters are trying to patch the sky, "I learned two things that day — money can make you invisible, and silence lubricates every lie, so I got very good at being quiet when it was profitable"
Maya's jaw tightens, her fingers tapping a rhythm on the table like a metronome, "So that's your neat moral backstory, you feel guilty, you want to be better, you stage a dare and call it growth, and call me naive if I fall for it," she says, and there's anger there but not all of it aimed at him, some of it aimed at the sort of men who use theatre for confession
He laughs, a short ugly sound, "I don't want praise for the confession, I don't want a medal for choosing to be less monstrous, I just wanted to know if I could see myself without the filters, if the person behind the brand was salvageable, it's not noble, it's practical, I wanted to feel if I had lungs that could breathe without the oxygen of influence"
A busker plays a tune that sounds like a broken lullaby, one of those old things you hear in family homes, and for a second Jace is a child again in a kitchen that smelled of varnish and hot tea, his father's hands steady on plans like commandments, and the scene blurs like a cheap film where the edges leak; this is the surreal part — the city's sounds become a chorus of servers humming, a low mechanical purr that Jace always hears when he's anxious, like data breathing, and he hates that his body's learned to translate fear into circuitry
"You're speaking in dead languages," Maya says, half smile, "translate, please, I'm not running a TED talk in Lisbon, I'm trying to figure out whether to trust you with my stupid heart and my camera and my rent, which all count the same to me"
He looks at her and there is a small honesty he hasn't allowed himself, "I once authorised a recall that saved the company but bankrupted a supplier, I signed the paper to bury another brand and we did it quietly and efficiently and someone lost a business for the sake of our market share, I told myself someone else would survive, numbers are funny like that, you count bodies as collateral and then your hands get used to the feel of it"
Maya huffs, a sound that is both disgust and a laugh, "You mean you were complicit in ruining people and then you sat on the balcony and wondered if you were still human, lovely, that's very Franklinist of you, did you at least feel bad while you were doing it"
He hates the mockery because it cuts where confession didn't, "You think I'm making theatre for sympathy, you think it's a PR curve, but you don't get to sit in boardrooms and watch how men make people smaller, you don't get to see the ledger close and the faces go grey, you learn to detach or you stop sleeping, and I wanted to try the other way before it was too late"
She watches him, and for the first time she doesn't snap something clever back, she only says, "So you did harm, knowingly or not, and now you want redemption via hardship, which may or may not be honest, it's a familiar script, don't expect me to applaud the poor man who wants to be poor by choice"
They sit in silence that hums with the city's server-lullaby, and his phone vibrates like a small insect, he ignores it at first and then looks because curiosity is human and awful, there is a message from an unknown number, a single photograph attached, grainy and close-up, an old wooden plaque with a logo he recognises, one he thought he'd erased, the logo of the supplier who disappeared after the recall, the one whose owner signed a contract and later had to close, there is a date scrawled in ink on the photo and under it a single word, "remember"
Maya sees the photo and her eyes narrow, she says, "Who sent that," and Jace's mouth goes dry, "I don't know," he says, and the lie is thin but it tastes like metal
"That's not a harmless prank," she says, her tone sharp, "that's someone who knows the ledger, someone who can reach back into the things you thought were tidy and pull them into light, where does that leave us then, you with your conscience and me with my camera and live feed"
He wants to protect her, that's the truth at the centre of his confusion, he wants to fold his hands around the thing that is not his to fix and he isn't sure why, "We leave," he says, but even as he speaks he knows leaving looks like running and running doesn't look brave, "We get out of the city, we change the plan, we go to Hoi An early, shake the water out of the sky"
Maya stands and for once her decision is not performative, she tucks the phone away like a priest hiding a relic, "I'm not your chaperone, I'm not your cleanup crew, I'm not even sure I'm the heroine in your story, but I am the only person here who cares about camera angles and truth, so here's what we do, you tell me every bad thing you ever did and I'm not talking PR edits, or you walk away now and keep your hands clean with polite lies"
He wants to tell her the whole ledger, every nick and every sin, but there are names that rip at him to keep quiet, people who would be hurt by exposure and a man who has made enemies that like to weigh scalps on their belt, "I can't," he says, small and surprised at his weakness, "not now"
Maya's laugh is sharp as snapped glass, "Of course you can't, and yet you expect me to trust you, it's a bit rich, honestly," she says, but there's something else under the sarcasm, fatigue maybe, or fear, and she softens for a second and says, "One lie and I walk, Jace, one lie and I'm gone, you hear me"
He nods, and somewhere a child across the street starts a toy that squeals like a ridiculous alarm and for a beat the world shudders and then the hostel's feed pings and a live notification blooms on Maya's camera like a bruise, someone has posted a throwback clip, a half-second film of a handshake under a rainlight, an angle he remembers, a man in the background smiling, and a caption that reads, "some deals never die — phase three coming"
Maya's hand tightens on the camera strap until her knuckles go white, she looks at him like a verdict and says, "Phase three of what, love, your cleansing tour or a vendetta," and the phone buzzes again with a tagged account that none of them want in their lives, the same account that has been stitching their nights into a script, the same one that knows how to make the past carve into the present, and outside the sky opens like a mouth and rain starts, soft at first, then loud as someone ripping up a map, and the cafe lights blink as if they're about to go out, and the last thing he hears before they run for cover is a child's voice singing a nursery rhyme wrong, the tune that haunts him, the lullaby that used to mean safety, now sounding like a nailed-on warning, and he realises the ledger isn't just numbers on paper, it's an echo, and someone is counting, and they are very far from done.