The char kway teow was, objectively, one of the best things I had ever eaten.

I say this as someone who was raised on Momma's dal tadka and Papa's stuffed potatoes and every variety of comfort food that two people from very different backgrounds could produce in one kitchen. I was not a person who lacked reference points for good food. And yet. There I was, sitting on a plastic stool outside a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning, eating flat rice noodles from a styrofoam container, and feeling, for approximately four minutes, like everything was fine.

"Told you," Isha said, not looking up from her own container.

"You were right," I said.

"I'm usually right about food."

"What else are you right about?"

She looked up. Considered. "Most things," she said, without any particular arrogance. Just as a statement of fact.

I laughed. It came out easier than I expected.

We sat there longer than we needed to, in no particular rush to go back, and I watched the street. A man on a bicycle weaving between parked cars. Two aunties at the next table deep in a conversation that required a lot of hand gestures. A gecko on the wall above the condiments, completely motionless, doing whatever geckos do when they go still.

Different, I kept thinking. And then: but not as different as I expected.

There was something about Singapore that felt — I didn't have the right word yet. Liveable. Like a city that had figured out some things. I'd only been here a day and I didn't know anything, but there was something about the way it moved that made me feel like I could exist inside it without too much friction.

Which was, I reminded myself, the whole point.

I was here to exist. For as long as I could manage it.

Kai texted the next morning.

Not a long text. Just: breakfast place opens at 7. you in?

I stared at it for longer than was strictly necessary, which was embarrassing, given that it was an invitation to eat breakfast and not a declaration of anything.

sure, I sent back.

I got dressed in approximately eleven minutes, which was a personal record, and then stood in the bathroom looking at myself in the mirror for another five, which cancelled out the efficiency entirely.

You are going for breakfast, I told my reflection. With a neighbour. This is normal. People do this.

My reflection looked unconvinced.

The breakfast place was a ten minute walk, down one of the shaded roads I was starting to recognise. Kai was already there when I arrived, at a corner table with two menus, scrolling through his phone with the relaxed posture of someone who was never in a hurry and didn't apologise for it.

He looked up when I came in.

"You found it okay?"

"You literally just said walk straight and turn left."

"Some people still manage to get lost."

"I have a functioning sense of direction."

"Good to know," he said, and handed me a menu.

This is the thing about Kai that I noticed over breakfast and then kept noticing for the days that followed: he was easy to be around in a way that very few people are. Not because he was always saying the right thing. He wasn't, particularly. He said what he thought, he asked questions without softening them first, he laughed at things I didn't expect him to find funny. But there was no performance to him. No sense that he was managing me or measuring what he said against what reaction it might get. He was just there, in whatever room he was in, entirely himself, and somehow that made it easier to be yourself back.

Which was inconvenient. Given everything.

We ate. We talked. He asked about London in the way people who've never been there ask about it — with specific, slightly random questions, less interested in the landmarks than in what it was actually like to live there. I told him about the grey winters, the specific smell of the Tube, the way the city makes you feel anonymous which is sometimes awful and sometimes exactly what you need.

He told me about his internship in Dubai, the strange suspended quality of being somewhere temporary, how it made you see your own city differently when you came back to it.

"Does Singapore feel different now?" I asked.

He thought about it. "Smaller," he said. "But in a good way. Like it fits better than it used to."

I looked at him across the table.

Don't, I thought.

I looked back at my coffee.

We fell into a loose routine over the following week. Not planned, exactly. More like gravity. He'd text, or I'd see him from the window, or Isha would mention she needed to go somewhere and Kai would materialise with the timing of someone who had decent instincts about these things.

He took me to a hawker centre that smelled extraordinary and overwhelming in equal measure. He showed me the reservoir near the neighbourhood, a wide stretch of water surrounded by trees so thick they blurred the edges of the sky. He walked me around the Botanic Gardens on a Thursday afternoon when the light was doing something specific to the colour of everything, going gold through the leaves, and I stopped in the middle of a path and just stood there for a moment, looking at it.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. "It's just — pretty."

"Yeah," he agreed. He was looking at the garden too.

He wasn't looking at the garden.

I started walking again before I could think about that.

At night I lay in the guest room and looked at the ceiling and told myself the same thing I'd been telling myself since the plane. You are here for treatment. You are here to try not to die. You are not here to develop feelings for the person next door, who is alive and has a whole life ahead of him and deserves someone who can be in it properly, which is not you, which will never be you, so.

It was a very convincing argument.

It would have been more convincing if my heart hadn't done that specific thing it kept doing whenever I heard his voice through the window.

Isha noticed, because Isha noticed everything and had apparently decided that being tactful about it was not her responsibility.

"You like him," she said one evening. We were in the kitchen, supposedly helping with dinner, actually just eating things from the counter while Aunt Reneta cooked. She said it the same way she said most things. Plainly, with no particular malice, as though she was commenting on the weather.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"You smiled at your phone for forty seconds this morning."

"I was reading something funny."

"It was a text from Kai."

"How do you even know that."

"Because you do this thing," she said, gesturing vaguely at my face, "when it's him. Your whole face sort of — softens."

"That's not a thing."

"It is absolutely a thing."

Aunt Reneta, who had the preternatural hearing of someone who had raised a child, said nothing from the stove. But something in the set of her shoulders suggested she was listening.

"Even if I did," I said, lowering my voice, "it doesn't matter."

Isha looked at me.

"Olivia—"

"It doesn't matter," I said again, more firmly. Not angry. Just definite. The way you are about things you've already thought through from every angle and arrived at the same place each time. "I'm not — I can't do that to someone. Get them involved and then—" I stopped. "It's not fair. To him."

Isha was quiet for a moment.

"Has anyone asked him what he thinks is fair?" she said.

"That's not how it works."

"Why not?"

"Because he doesn't know. And if he knew he wouldn't — it would change everything. The way everyone looks at me changes when they know." I thought of Papa's face in the hospital. Of the way my friends had gone so carefully quiet at graduation. "I don't want him to look at me like that."

Isha didn't say anything to that. She picked up a piece of cucumber from the chopping board and ate it and looked at the window.

"For what it's worth," she said eventually, "he already looks at you like something."

I didn't answer.

I ate a piece of cucumber too and tried very hard not to think about what that meant.

Kai's pov

The girl from next door was confusing him.

Not in an unpleasant way. More in the way that certain things are confusing because they're more interesting than you expected and you haven't adjusted yet. Like arriving somewhere new and finding that the maps you had were slightly wrong, not useless, just imprecise.

Kai had moved back from Dubai with a clear enough idea of the next few months. Settle back in, start the job, see his friends, decompress from eight months of living out of a suitcase in a city that was never going to feel like his. Simple. Sequential. He was good at sequential.

Olivia was not sequential.

She was, from what he could tell, about seventeen contradictions in a single person. She made jokes about things that weren't funny and then looked slightly surprised that she'd made them, as if the humour arrived before the permission to use it. She noticed things — small things, background things, the gecko on the wall, the specific colour of light through leaves — and when she noticed them she went very still, like she was trying to hold the image still long enough to keep it. She deflected personal questions with a precision that suggested she'd had a lot of practice and wasn't entirely comfortable with how good she'd got at it.

And there was something else. Something underneath all of it that he couldn't name. A quality of — attention, maybe. The way she was present in a room, in a conversation. Like she was taking it seriously in a way that most people didn't bother to.

He'd noticed it on the plane first. The way she'd looked out the window at Dubai's lights. Like she was memorising them.

He'd assumed she was just tired.

Now he wasn't sure that was it.

He texted her most mornings. This had happened without a decision being made about it. He would wake up and think of something — a place he wanted to show her, something he'd read, a genuinely useless fact about Singapore's drainage system that he'd somehow retained from secondary school — and he would send it before he'd fully thought it through. She always replied. Usually something dry, one or two lines, occasionally something that made him actually laugh out loud in his kitchen alone at seven in the morning, which was not something he'd expected from anyone, let alone someone he'd known for ten days.

His friend Marcus, who had known him long enough to have opinions about his behaviour, had visited last Thursday and taken approximately four minutes to notice something was different.

"You seem cheerful," Marcus said, with the specific suspicion of someone used to Kai being cheerful and therefore aware that this was a different kind.

"I'm always cheerful."

"You're particularly cheerful."

"I just got back from eight months abroad, I'm allowed to be happy to be home."

Marcus looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone who has decided not to push it yet but is making a note for later.

Kai changed the subject.

The thing was — and this was the part he kept circling back to, the part that didn't fit neatly — she held him at a specific distance. Not cold. Not unfriendly. She showed up, she talked to him, she laughed, she was there. But there was a line, somewhere, that she'd drawn without announcing it, and every time he got close to it she'd step back just slightly, just enough. Like someone standing at the edge of something and not letting themselves look down.

He didn't know what it meant.

He thought about it more than was probably warranted for someone he'd known for less than two weeks.

It happened on a Thursday evening, which in retrospect felt too ordinary a backdrop for something that made his whole nervous system register as significant.

They'd been at the reservoir. His idea, he'd wanted to show her the way it looked at dusk, the light going off the water, the way the city disappeared behind the tree line and you could almost forget it was there. She'd come without much persuasion, which he was choosing to read as a good sign.

They'd walked for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then stopped at a section of the path where the water was close and the trees opened up and you could see all of it at once. The sky was doing something spectacular, the way Singapore skies do at the tail end of the day, purpling at the edges, the water picking up the colour.

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she said, very quietly, almost to herself: "I want to remember this one."

He looked at her.

She was still looking at the water, her arms loosely folded, and there was something in her expression that he hadn't seen before. Not sad, exactly. More like — deliberate. Like she was choosing to be here, specifically, consciously, in a way that most people didn't have to choose.

"Take a photo," he said.

"Photos don't get it right."

"They don't have to get it right. They just have to remind you."

She looked at him then. Really looked at him, the way she sometimes did when he said something she hadn't expected, like she was recalibrating something.

And for a moment the distance she usually kept wasn't there.

He felt it, the absence of it. The small shift in the space between them. Like a change in air pressure before rain.

He didn't move. He didn't say anything. He just looked back at her, and let the moment be what it was.

Her phone buzzed.

She looked down. The moment folded up and went somewhere. She took a small breath, the kind that's really a reset, and looked back at the water.

"Isha's asking where I am," she said. Her voice was normal. Perfectly normal.

"We should head back," he said.

"Yeah."

They walked back through the trees in the dusk, not talking much, and he thought about the way she'd said I want to remember this one, and the specific weight of the word one, and the feeling that it implied others, and that somewhere behind the line she'd drawn there was something she wasn't telling him.

He didn't ask.

Not yet.

But he thought about it the whole way home.