Chapter 8

The deposition was scheduled for a Monday in December at the offices of Givens & Associates on the fourteenth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan that had the particular gravity of a place where serious things happened routinely and had stopped requiring acknowledgment. Soo Yee had been in serious places before — federal courthouses, university lecture halls, the Yale Law conference room on the night of the first call — but this was different. This was the place where what she had built was going to be formally introduced into the legal record. After today it would not just be a website. It would be evidence.

Her father drove. Her mother sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap. Sung Min had taken the train down from New Haven the night before and was in the back seat beside Soo Yee with a manila folder on his knee that he had reviewed three times on the train and twice at the kitchen table after dinner and once more at six-thirty this morning. He was not nervous. He was thorough, which in this family looked the same from the outside.

The city moved past the windows in its December iteration — the light lower and more direct than November, the streets carrying the particular density of a place that had fully committed to the cold. Soo Yee watched it and ran through the deposition structure the way she had been running through it for a week. Percy Givens had prepared her carefully. How to answer. What to answer. The difference between what she knew and what she had concluded and the importance of keeping those categories cleanly separated in her responses. A deposition was not a presentation. It was a record. Every word she said today would be in a document that opposing counsel would read and attempt to use.

She was not worried about opposing counsel. She was worried about saying something imprecise.

“You’ve prepared,” her father said from the front seat. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Then there’s nothing left to do until you’re in the room.”

He said it the way he said most things — straightforwardly, without ornament, as a simple statement of engineering logic. Preparation was the variable you controlled. Everything after that was execution. Worrying about execution before you were executing was a waste of processing capacity.

Soo Yee understood this. She looked out the window and let the city move past and stopped running through the deposition structure and simply sat.

The conference room at Givens & Associates had a long table and windows that looked north across the city and a court reporter named Mrs. Fallon who set up her equipment with the efficient neutrality of someone for whom this room and this table and this particular quality of morning light were entirely ordinary. Percy Givens was already there when they arrived, in a dark suit that fit him the way suits fit people who wore them as working clothes rather than costumes. Maya Reinholt was beside him with a legal pad and the focused attention that Soo Yee had come to recognize as her baseline state of being.

Harvard’s counsel was a woman named Patricia Sloane from a firm whose name occupied three lines on the business card she handed to Soo Yee’s parents with a smile that was professionally calibrated to communicate reasonableness without conceding anything. She had two associates with her, both male, both carrying the particular alertness of people whose job today was to watch and take notes and say nothing unless instructed.

Soo Yee sat at the table across from the court reporter. Her parents sat against the wall behind her. Sung Min sat beside her — not as her attorney, Percy Givens was clear about that, but as a family member who happened to be a third-year law student, which was a distinction that Patricia Sloane had noted and not objected to.

Mrs. Fallon established the date and time and the names of the parties present. Patricia Sloane confirmed that she understood the witness was a minor and that the proceeding was being conducted with parental consent. Everyone agreed that this was the case.