Dr Nair used the word cautiously.

"The counts are responding," she said, looking at the results on her screen, then at me, then back at the screen like she wanted to double check before she let herself say anything else. "Better than I expected at this stage, honestly. We're not at remission yet but we're moving in the right direction."

I sat very still.

"How much in the right direction," I said.

"Enough that I'm adjusting the protocol. We'll continue the current regimen but I want to reduce the frequency of the infusions, give your body more time to recover between cycles." She looked at me properly now. "How are you feeling? Physically."

"Less terrible," I said. "Like maybe sixty percent of a person instead of forty."

She almost smiled. "That's actually a meaningful improvement."

Momma, beside me, made a sound that was not quite a word. I reached over and put my hand on top of hers on the armrest without looking at her.

"What does this mean," I said. "Going forward."

"It means the treatment is doing something. It means we keep going and we see." She paused. "I don't want you to read more into this than it is. We're not declaring victory. But it's good news, Olivia. You're allowed to take it as good news."

I looked at the window.

Outside, Singapore was doing what it always did, being relentlessly, aggressively alive. A tree branch moving in wind I couldn't feel from here. A bird crossing the frame of the window in a straight unhurried line.

"Okay," I said.

My small firm period. Kai would have recognised it.

"Okay," I said again. "Thank you."

The first thing I did when I got home was sit on the floor of the guest room.

Not the bed. The floor. I don't know why exactly. It just seemed like the right place for something that didn't quite fit inside normal furniture yet. I sat with my back against the bed and my knees pulled up and I held the news carefully, the way you hold something you're not sure is real yet, turning it over slowly so you can check it from every angle.

The treatment is doing something.

It means we keep going.

It's good news. You're allowed to take it as good news.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Not crying. Just feeling the pressure of something very large trying to find somewhere to go.

My phone lit up on the floor beside me.

Kai: how did it go

I looked at it for a moment.

Me: it's working

Me: like. it's actually working

The three dots appeared and disappeared twice, like he'd started typing something and then reconsidered, which was unusual for him.

Then: come outside

I looked at the message.

Me: right now?

Kai: right now

I got up off the floor. I went downstairs and out through the front door and through the gap in the hedge, and he was in his garden already, and he looked at my face when I came through and then he crossed the garden in about four steps and hugged me.

Not the tentative kind. Not the careful, how-much-does-she-need kind. Just properly, both arms, like he'd been waiting to and had finally been given a reason.

I stood there for a moment with my face against his shoulder, and the enormous thing that had been trying to find somewhere to go found somewhere.

We stood in the garden for a while.

Neither of us said anything.

Which was, I think, exactly right.

Here is the thing about good news when you've been living inside bad news for long enough: it changes the texture of everything.

Not permanently. Not in a way you could point to on a map and say here, this is where it shifted. But in small daily ways. The mornings felt different. Not lighter exactly but more present, like I'd stopped bracing slightly against them and could just be in them instead. I started noticing things again the way I had in the first weeks in Singapore, before the treatment had narrowed my world down to the space between the bed and the sofa. The specific green of the trees at a certain time of day. The sound the rain made on Aunt Reneta's roof, which was different from London rain, more decisive, less apologetic about itself.

I started going out more. First just walks in the neighbourhood, taking the routes Kai had shown me, learning which coffee shop opened earliest and which stretch of pavement had the most interesting cats. Then further. The Botanic Gardens again, and the reservoir, and one afternoon a hawker centre Isha had been promising me for weeks where I ate something extraordinary and sat in the heat and felt approximately human for the first time in a month.

Isha noticed the change before I announced it.

"You're back," she said one morning, looking at me over her coffee.

"I was always here," I said.

"You were here but you weren't here." She tapped the side of her head. "Now you're here."

I didn't argue with this because she was right.

Kai and I had slipped into something that didn't have a clean label but felt, from the inside, like the most natural thing in the world. He came over most evenings. Sometimes we went out, sometimes we stayed in, sometimes we sat on the steps outside Aunt Reneta's house in the warm dark and talked about nothing until it was late enough that staying was impractical and he went back through the hedge. He'd taken to leaving small things. A book he thought I'd like left on the garden wall. A text at odd hours with something he'd remembered and wanted to tell me. Once, inexplicably, a single very good mango, just placed on the step with no explanation, which when I texted him about he claimed total ignorance of and which neither of us mentioned again.

Momma watched all of this with the careful neutrality of a woman who had opinions she was choosing not to express, which was honestly more alarming than if she'd just expressed them.

"You like him," she said one evening, not a question, while we were in the kitchen.

"Momma."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just noting."

"You're definitely saying something."

She poured herself more masala chai. "He's good to you," she said simply. "That's all I was going to say."

I looked at her.

"Yeah," I said. "He is."

She nodded, satisfied, and that was the end of the conversation, which was the most Momma way possible of having it.

It happened on a Thursday afternoon, which is a very undignified day of the week for the most embarrassing thing that has ever occurred in my life.

I want to be clear before I explain this that I had a perfectly reasonable justification for what I was doing. I was curious. That's all. Curiosity is a normal human quality. Curious people look things up. That's what looking things up is for.

What I was looking up was Kai.

Not in a strange way. Just. He'd mentioned once, in passing, that he'd done some photography work before the internship, and I'd been thinking about that because he'd mentioned it the way people mention things they care about and then downplay, and I wanted to see the work because I was curious, because I was someone who paid attention to things, which he himself had said about me and was therefore a compliment and not a flaw.

So I had his full name, which I'd seen on a piece of mail on his kitchen counter during one of the evenings we'd spent there, and I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop open doing what any reasonable curious person would do.

I had found his photography portfolio.

It was good. Actually genuinely good, the kind that made you feel something rather than just appreciate the technical skill. Lots of people, lots of streets, that specific quality of catching someone in a moment they didn't know was being caught. I was on the third page of it, which meant I had been looking for a while, which meant I was very invested in this research, when my phone rang.

It was a video call.

From Kai.

I accepted it on reflex, which is the only explanation I have for what happened next, because if I'd had half a second to think about it I would have closed the laptop first, but I didn't have half a second and I didn't close the laptop and the angle of the camera was such that it was entirely visible over my shoulder.

His face appeared on my screen.

He opened his mouth to say something.

Stopped.

His eyes moved very slightly to the right. To the laptop. To the very clear image on the screen of his own photography portfolio.

There was a silence that lasted approximately one thousand years.

"I can explain," I said.

"That's my portfolio," he said.

"I was curious."

"You were looking at my portfolio."

"I mentioned that I was curious."

"Page three," he said.

"I was doing research."

"Research," he repeated, in the tone of someone savouring a word they're going to use against you for a long time.

"Into your. Work." I closed the laptop with what I hoped was dignity. It was not dignity. "You mentioned the photography once and I wanted to see it. That's a perfectly normal thing to do."

He looked at me for a moment. Then something in his face shifted and he pressed his lips together very hard, which I recognised as him trying not to laugh.

"It's not funny," I said.

"It's a little funny."

"It's not."

"Olivia. You went to page three."

"Your work is good," I said, with as much composure as I could gather, which was not much. "You should have mentioned it more than once."

He did laugh then, properly, the surprised kind that he couldn't hold onto. And I felt my own face do the thing it did when he laughed, the involuntary warmth of it, the way I'd been cataloguing this sound for weeks from the armchair and was now experiencing it up close.

"Okay," he said, when he'd recovered. "Since we're doing confessions."

"We're not doing confessions."

"I googled you," he said.

I stared at him.

"When?" I said.

"Three days after the plane."

"Kai."

"I wanted to know if you were real," he said. "Like, if Olivia Sharma from London was an actual person who existed."

"And?"

"And you have a very strongly worded review of a restaurant in Islington from 2021 that is genuinely one of the best things I've ever read."

I put my face in my hands.

"I was sixteen," I said, into my palms. "They got my order wrong twice and then tried to charge me for it."

"You used the phrase 'a masterclass in audacity.' I read it four times."

"I hate you," I said.

"No you don't," he said.

I looked up at him through the screen.

He was smiling, that specific smile, the one that wasn't performing anything. Just him, finding this genuinely, completely delightful.

"No," I said. "I don't."

There was a small, warm pause.

"The photography is good though," I said. "I meant that. You have a way of catching people."

Something changed in his expression. Softened.

"Thank you," he said. Quietly. Like he meant it more than the words covered.

"You should do more of it."

"I've been thinking about it actually." He looked slightly to the side, that habit of his when he was considering something. "Been taking some lately. Just around the neighbourhood."

"Of what?"

He looked back at me.

"Things I want to remember," he said.

I held his gaze on the small screen and thought about the reservoir, the way he'd said take a photo, they just have to remind you, and the specific quality of this moment, which I was already trying to memorise.

"Yeah," I said softly. "Me too."

Lyla texted that evening.

teenage mutant ninja turtles 🐢🐢🐢🐢

lyla: OKAY so hypothetically

lyla: if enzo and i wanted to come visit

lyla: like. to singapore

lyla: hypothetically

lyla: because we miss you and also enzo has been absolutely insufferable since you left and I cannot take it anymore

enzo: I have been completely fine

lyla: you made a playlist called "olivia is gone and everything is terrible"

enzo: that's just a normal playlist title

lyla: it has 47 songs on it enzo

enzo: I have a lot of feelings

I read the whole exchange twice and felt something warm and enormous settle in my chest.

Me: when

lyla: WE WERE HOPING YOU'D SAY THAT

lyla: enzo has been looking at flights for three weeks

enzo: I have not

lyla: you showed me the spreadsheet

enzo: it was a casual spreadsheet

lyla: there were colour codes

I laughed. Properly, the kind that came from somewhere uncomplicated, and it sounded strange in the quiet room, and I didn't mind at all.

Me: come. please come.

lyla: okay we're coming oh my god

lyla: okay I'm going to cry

enzo: I'm not going to cry

enzo: (I might cry)

I put the phone down on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

The treatment was working. Lyla and Enzo were coming. Kai had googled me three days after the plane and found a restaurant review that I stood completely by because they absolutely deserved it and I regretted nothing.

I thought about Liam. The grin. The paratha. Look at that. My name in actual print.

I thought: this. This is what using the time looks like.

Outside the window, the last of the evening light was doing something to the sky over the neighbour's garden, turning it a colour I didn't have a name for, warm and brief, the kind that was already leaving by the time you noticed it.

I noticed it anyway.

I held onto it as long as I could.