Chapter 1The Nameplate
The alarm went off at 6:45, and Ping was already awake before it finished its second ring.
He lay there for a second, staring at the ceiling, letting himself feel the flutter in his chest. *Today's the day.* Six months of silence, six months of "we'll get back to you," six months of his mother sliding extra egg onto his plate without saying why — and today he finally had an interview that mattered.
He got up, showered fast, and made himself scrambled eggs and toast, eating standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like it would slow him down. Into his bag went his laptop, a notebook, two pens (because one always died at the worst moment), and — carefully, so it wouldn't crease — the folder with his portfolio and resume. He checked his watch. 7:40.
*On time. Good.*
He booked a cab from the app, grabbed his blazer off the hook by the door, and left.
---
The phone rang halfway through the ride.
"Ping-ah, are you there yet?" His mother's voice, warm and a little too loud, the way it always got when she was trying not to sound worried.
"Not yet, Mae, still in the cab. Like fifteen more minutes."
"Okay, okay. Did you eat?"
"I ate."
"Good boy. I lit some incense for you this morning, you know. For luck."
Ping smiled out the window. "Thank you. And — thanks for last night too. For being happy for me. I know I've been kind of a mess the past few months."
"You weren't a mess. You were finding your way back." A pause. "Now go find it. Call me after."
"I will. Love you, Mae."
He hung up, exhaled, and let his shoulders drop an inch. Then he pulled out his notebook and started running through his answers again — not because he didn't know them, but because saying them quietly to himself was the only thing that kept his hands from shaking. *Tell me about a campaign you're proud of. Tell me how you'd handle a client who hates your first draft. Tell me why advertising.* He'd done interviews before. This wasn't his first rodeo. It was just the first one that felt like it actually mattered.
---
The cab pulled up fifteen minutes later, and Ping stepped out onto the sidewalk and just — looked up.
The building was enormous, all glass and clean steel, catching the morning light like it had been built specifically to intimidate nervous twenty-something job applicants. *Wow.* He allowed himself exactly three seconds of awe before straightening his blazer.
*Please*, he thought, eyes closing briefly, *just let this be the one.*
Inside, the front desk sent him through the usual motions — ID, form, a small laminated token with a number printed on it in bold black ink. **47.**
"Waiting area's through there," the receptionist said, pointing toward a set of frosted glass doors. "There's a lot of you today, so it might be a bit of a wait."
*A lot* turned out to be an understatement. The room on the other side had to hold fifty, maybe sixty people, all in various states of interview-appropriate stiffness — some rehearsing under their breath, some scrolling their phones too fast to actually be reading anything, one guy visibly sweating through his shirt.
Ping found a seat near two people who, judging by the way they were laughing, had already decided the whole thing wasn't worth being terrified over.
"You're forty-seven?" the girl said, glancing at his token, then at hers. "We're forty-five and forty-six. Guess we're stuck together."
"I'm Fon," said the boy beside her, sticking out a hand. "This is Beam. We've been best friends since, like, forever, so fair warning, we come as a package."
Ping laughed despite himself and shook both their hands. "Ping."
"Where are you from, Ping?" Beam asked, leaning back in his chair like they had all the time in the world instead of fifty candidates ahead of a nerve-wracking interview.
"Nonthaburi, originally. You?"
"Chiang Mai," Fon said. "Moved down two years ago for a job that didn't work out. Story for another day."
"What'd you do before this?" Ping asked.
"Junior copywriter, small agency, absolutely soul-crushing," Beam said cheerfully. "You?"
"Same field, different soul-crushing. I actually took six months off after mine ended."
"Oh, respect," Fon said. "We should've done that."
Somehow, in the span of ten minutes, Ping learned more about two strangers than he had about some of his own coworkers over a year — hometowns, old jobs, a disastrous group project from university that apparently still haunted Beam's dreams. It helped. His shoulders unknotted a little more with every joke.
Then a voice called out from the doorway: "Numbers forty-five through fifty!"
The laughing stopped. All three of them stood at once.
---
The interview room was quieter than the waiting area — quieter in a way that felt heavy, not calm. Six interviewers sat behind a long table, and even from the door Ping could see the tiredness in their faces, the particular exhaustion of people who had asked the same five questions forty times already that morning and were still waiting for an answer that surprised them.
There was a seventh chair. Empty. A small nameplate sat in front of it, engraved in gold lettering: **Sarawut Chaiyapruk**, and beneath it, one word: **CEO**.
Ping's eyes caught on the name for half a second longer than they should have. Something about it — the shape of the letters, maybe, or just the *feeling* of it — tugged at something in the back of his mind. A flicker. Gone before he could hold onto it.
*Weird*, he thought, and let it go. Nerves did strange things to a person's brain.
"Please, sit," one of the interviewers said, gesturing to the six chairs lined up facing the panel.
They sat. The questions started immediately — no warm-up, straight into it.
"How would you pitch a product that's already failed twice in the market?"
"Give us an angle for a client who refuses to spend on digital."
"Convince us why a boring product deserves an exciting campaign."
"We want everyone's own answer," the lead interviewer said flatly, scanning the row. "No repeating what the person before you said. If you don't have an original angle, say so."
It went around the row. Ping — seated dead center — watched the numbers 48, 49, and 50 falter one by one, their answers thinner and shakier each time, until the interviewer finally said, not unkindly, "Thank you. Please take some more time to prepare and consider applying again next cycle," and they were quietly shown out.
Fon and Beam, on either side of Ping, had both answered sharp and fast, clearly enjoying themselves despite the pressure. Ping's own answer — something about reframing a "boring" product around the person who'd be embarrassed to admit they needed it — got the first real reaction from the panel all morning: a raised eyebrow, a scribbled note.
Then seven more candidates were brought in, numbers already circled from an earlier round, and the questions sharpened further — one last, hardest task thrown at the whole group, the kind of question designed less to find a right answer than to see who didn't panic.
When it was over, the lead interviewer read off a short list. "Forty-five. Forty-six. Forty-seven. Twelve. Twenty-nine. Please remain."
Ping barely registered his own number before Fon grabbed his sleeve, grinning.
---
That was when the door opened again, and someone leaned in and said, low but audible: "He's on his way up."
The whole tone of the room shifted. The interviewers actually sat up straighter.
"You're all very lucky," the lead interviewer said, almost amused. "You get to meet the boss himself."
Ping didn't turn to look at the door — none of them did, too busy exchanging quick, nervous glances with each other — until a new presence filled the room, and the air itself seemed to change.
A scent reached him first. Clean, warm, something like cedar and rain — and horribly, disorientingly *familiar*, in a way Ping couldn't place and didn't have time to chase, because the man was already moving down the line, shaking hands, saying a few words to each candidate.
*I know this smell.* The thought arrived out of nowhere and refused to leave. *I know this—*
He kept his eyes down. He told himself it was professionalism. Really, it was that his heart had started doing something strange and he needed a second to get it under control. He watched a pair of clean, unhurried shoes stop in front of each candidate in turn, watched the line get shorter, and shorter, until —
The shoes stopped in front of him.
"And you are?" A voice. Low, easy, faintly amused at the edges.
Ping's hand was already moving to shake — because that was what you did, that was the *procedure* — before the voice had even fully landed. And when it did land, something in his chest dropped straight through the floor.
*I've heard this voice before.*
Not in this building. Not in an office. On a bus — six months ago, rain against the windows, a stranger in the seat beside him who'd turned and asked, with exactly that same easy amusement, *"So, what's your name?"*
Ping's head snapped up before he could stop it.
And whatever composure he had left went with it.
"...Aim?"
The name — the *nickname* — left his mouth before his brain caught up to what it was doing, blunt and disbelieving and far too familiar for a room full of executives who'd never heard anyone call their CEO anything but *sir*.
The silence that followed was immediate and total.
Beam's hand found Ping's arm under the table and squeezed, hard — a wordless *fix this, now* — and Ping felt heat crawl up his neck as he scrambled to recover.
"I — apologies. Peeravich. Ping. It's — nice to meet you," he managed, voice cracking slightly on the formal register he should have used in the first place.
The CEO — Sarawut Chaiyapruk, the nameplate had said, though apparently almost no one used the name that came before it either — looked at him for one long moment. Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and unreadable, gone before anyone else could catch it.
Then he smiled, easy as anything, and shook Ping's hand properly.
"Nice to meet you too," he said. "Though I should mention — nobody's dared call me that in a very long time."
He didn't let go right away.
And somewhere behind Ping's eyes, uninvited, a memory began to surface — rain on a window, a shared umbrella, a voice asking his name for the very first time.
