Aunt Reneta's house was in a part of Singapore that felt like it had been designed by someone who wanted to prove a point about trees.

Every road we turned down had them. Not the decorative kind, small and apologetic in their little concrete squares. Real trees, tall ones, the kind with roots that crack pavements and branches that meet overhead and make the whole street feel like a tunnel of green. The taxi moved through them slowly, the early morning light coming through in pieces, and I watched it all from the window with the specific numbness of someone who has not slept enough and is now being presented with too much beauty to process.

"Almost there," Momma said, to no one in particular.

She'd been quiet for most of the drive. Not the bad kind of quiet. The held-breath kind. The kind that happens when you're about to see someone you love imperfectly and you're trying to remember where you left off.

The taxi stopped.

The house was a two-storey private property, the kind that in London would cost an amount of money that makes your vision go slightly blurry. Here it sat at the end of a short driveway behind a low gate, cream-coloured walls, terracotta pots of something flowering along the front step. Ordinary and not ordinary, in the way of things that have been lived in and loved.

Before I'd even got my bag out of the boot, the front door opened.

Isha came down the driveway at a speed that was technically walking but communicated the emotional urgency of a sprint. She was taller than I remembered, her hair cut short now in a way that suited her, and she was already reaching for me before we'd said a word.

"Olivia." She hugged me properly, both arms, the kind of hug that doesn't do anything polite. "Oh, you must be so tired."

"I'm okay," I said into her shoulder.

"You're not," she said. "But that's fine. Come inside."

She said it without any drama. No pity face, no careful handling of me like I might shatter. Just: you're not okay, and that's fine, and come inside. I liked her immediately, or rather I remembered that I'd always liked her and had just forgotten.

Momma and I carried our bags to the guest room, which was on the first floor, down a corridor that smelled of something faintly floral, jasmine or something close to it, the kind of smell that belongs to houses that have been looked after.

Momma was fidgeting. Her hands kept moving without purpose, smoothing a bedsheet that was already smooth, adjusting the strap of her bag, tapping her thumb against her wrist. I recognised it. It was the same thing she did before important conversations, before phone calls she'd been putting off. Nervous hands on a body trying to look calm.

I went to her and just stood beside her for a moment.

"She asked us here," I said.

"I know."

"That means something."

Momma looked at the window. Outside, a bird was doing something complicated in the branches of a tree I couldn't name.

"We didn't have an easy time of it," she said. "Growing up. Not with each other, necessarily. Just. The situation." She paused. "When two people are both trying to figure out where they belong in the same house, it's not always — it doesn't always make you close. Sometimes it just makes you careful with each other."

"But you're okay now."

"We're okay now," she agreed. "We just have to keep remembering that."

She gave me a look that meant this conversation is over for now, and then she left the room to go find Aunt Reneta.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

The room was quiet. Outside, I could hear Momma's footsteps in the corridor, then a door opening, then two voices beginning to speak. Low, careful, feeling their way. I couldn't make out the words.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

Here we are, I thought. Singapore. This is Singapore. I am in Singapore lying on a bed that isn't mine looking at a ceiling I've never seen before and I have approximately one year to be alive in it.

Okay. Cool. Very normal.

I sat back up.

And then I looked out the window.

He was just standing in the garden next door. No reason for it, apparently. Not doing anything, not on his phone, not watering something. Just standing there in the early morning with a mug of something, looking at the garden the way people sometimes look at things when they're thinking about something else entirely.

Kai.

I blinked.

He looked up.

Saw me in the window.

His face did something that was not quite any single expression — surprise, and something else, and then something that became a grin slowly, like it needed a moment to believe what it was seeing.

I opened the window.

"Seriously?" I said.

"Eh." He looked genuinely delighted. "What are you doing here?"

"My aunt lives here. What are you doing here?"

He pointed at the house next door. His house, apparently. The one that was about four metres from where I was sitting.

"How long have we been neighbours," he said, which wasn't really a question.

"I got here ten minutes ago."

"Okay fair." He took a sip from his mug. "You get any sleep on the plane?"

"A bit."

"You look terrible."

"Thank you, Kai."

"I mean you look tired. That's different."

"It really isn't."

He smiled. "Come over later if you want. I can show you the neighbourhood. There's a good place nearby for breakfast, opens at seven."

I looked at him. This person who I had met on a plane twelve hours ago, who now apparently lived next door, who was standing in a garden in Singapore offering me breakfast like this was all perfectly normal and sequential.

"Sure," I said. Because what else do you say.

Aunt Reneta was smaller than I remembered. That's the thing about adults you knew as a child — they exist at a different scale in your memory, slightly larger than life, and then you grow up and the scale corrects itself and it's always a little startling.

She was in the living room when I came down, sitting across from Momma, and for a moment before they saw me I watched them. The way they were sitting. Not close, not far, a careful medium distance that had probably been arrived at over years of knowing exactly how close was comfortable and exactly how far was rude. Two women who had grown up in the same house and come out of it as something that didn't have a clean word. Not estranged. Not close. Something in between that they'd both agreed to maintain without ever discussing it.

Aunt Reneta looked up when I came in.

"Olivia," she said, and stood, and hugged me. It was a good hug, warm and genuine, if slightly brief. The hug of someone who cares and isn't entirely sure how to show it for the right length of time.

"You look like your mother," she said, pulling back to look at me. "Around the eyes."

"People say that," I said.

"It's true." She gestured to the sofa. "Sit. Are you hungry? Isha can make something."

"I'm okay."

She nodded. Looked at Momma. Something passed between them that wasn't quite a look and wasn't quite a nod. More like an acknowledgement. We'll get to it. Just not yet.

"You must be exhausted," Aunt Reneta said to me. "From the journey. And everything before it."

She said everything before it very carefully, the way you say something when you know the weight of it and don't want to drop it in the wrong place.

"A bit," I said.

"Rest first," she said. "We have time."

It was a kind thing to say. I wasn't sure if it was true, given the circumstances, but it was kind, and sometimes that's what you go with.

Isha found me an hour later sitting by the window in the guest room, doing nothing in particular.

"Come to the supermarket with me," she said. "Aunty wants to make carbonara tonight."

"Does she need help?"

"She needs someone to carry things. Also I think she wants us out of the house for a bit so her and your mum can actually talk." She said this with the tone of someone who had grown up watching adults navigate each other and had long since stopped finding it surprising. "Come on. It'll be good. Get you outside."

We walked to the supermarket, which was maybe ten minutes away, through streets that were already warm despite the hour. I kept noticing things. The way the pavements here were almost entirely shaded by the trees overhead. A cat sitting on a wall, completely unbothered by us. An old man at a coffee shop reading a newspaper, a small fan on the table tilted toward him.

Different, and not different. That was Singapore so far.

"How are you actually?" Isha asked, not looking at me, examining a packet of pasta.

"I don't know," I said.

"That's honest."

"It's the only honest answer."

She put the pasta in the basket. Moved to the next aisle. "My mum told me a bit. About the diagnosis. About why you came."

"Yeah."

"I'm glad you came. Even if the reason is awful." She said it simply, without dressing it up. I appreciated that more than I could explain. I'd had a month of carefully constructed sentences from people who cared about me, every word weighed before it was put down, and Isha just said the thing.

"Me too," I said. "I think."

My stomach made a noise at that point that was frankly unreasonable. Loud, prolonged, completely without dignity.

Isha looked at me.

"I haven't actually eaten since the airport," I said.

"Olivia."

"I know."

"There's a good char kway teow place on the way back," she said. "We're going there before we go home. I'm not negotiating."

"I don't know what that is."

"You will in about twenty minutes."

She was already walking toward the checkout.

I followed her, basket in hand, through the bright supermarket light, and thought: okay. This person. This is going to be fine, actually, if this person is part of it.

Outside, the late morning air wrapped around us, warm and close and smelling of rain somewhere nearby that hadn't arrived yet. Isha talked about the neighbourhood as we walked. What was good, what was overrated, which coffee shop the locals actually went to versus the ones that showed up on tourist lists. Normal things. The kind of information that assumes you're going to be around long enough for it to matter.

I let it wash over me and tried to believe that was true.