The appointment had been sitting in my phone calendar for two weeks.

I know because I kept seeing it every time I opened the app to check something else, which meant I kept accidentally checking it and then closing it faster than strictly necessary. It had a little red dot beside it, the way calendar events do when they're today, which felt unnecessarily aggressive for something I was already thinking about constantly.

SGH Oncology — Dr Priya Nair. 9am.

Momma had made the appointment the day after we arrived. She'd done it quietly, efficiently, the way she handled things she was frightened of, by moving fast enough that the fear didn't have time to catch up. She'd printed the confirmation and put it on the kitchen counter and neither of us had mentioned it for two weeks, which was a remarkable feat of mutual avoidance that I think we were both slightly proud of.

The morning of, I woke up at six without an alarm.

I lay there for a while. Not thinking, exactly. More like being very aware of being awake and not wanting to start the day yet because starting the day meant the day would progress and the day progressing meant eventually it would be 9am and I would be in a room with another doctor who would say more things I would have to absorb.

Outside, a mynah was making its case loudly to no one in particular. They'll argue with you if you let them, Isha had said. I'd been in Singapore long enough now to know that was true.

I didn't feel like arguing with anything.

I got up. Showered. Stood in front of the wardrobe for longer than I'd like to admit, trying to decide what you wear to an oncology appointment in a country that isn't yours. It's not a decision with a correct answer. It just occupies your brain because it's easier than the other thoughts crowding behind it. I wore the blue top in the end. It seemed like the kind of colour that was trying to be optimistic without being obnoxious about it.

Momma was already in the kitchen when I came down, dressed and composed, two cups of tea on the table. She looked up when I came in and gave me a smile that did not entirely reach her eyes but was making a genuine effort.

We drank our tea. Didn't say much. The morning sat between us, careful and large.

Aunt Reneta appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown, hair not yet done, which was unusual for her. She looked at both of us.

"I'll come," she said.

Momma opened her mouth.

"Helen," Aunt Reneta said, quietly. Firmly. "I'll come."

Something moved across Momma's face. Not surprise exactly. More like the specific relief of someone who has been carrying something alone and just felt another pair of hands take some of the weight. She pressed her lips together for a moment.

"Okay," she said. "Thank you."

Aunt Reneta nodded and went to get dressed, and I looked at the space she'd left in the doorway and thought about how sometimes people show you who they are not through the big gestures but through the small quiet ones. The ones they don't announce.

Singapore General Hospital was not what I'd expected.

Not better or worse than the hospitals I knew. Just different, the way all large institutions develop their own particular character over time. SGH was cooler than I expected, the air conditioning working hard against the heat outside, and enormous — a sprawl of connected buildings linked by covered walkways that reminded me slightly of a small city within a city. People moved through it with an efficiency that came from familiarity, knowing exactly where to turn, which lift to take, how long the queues ran at different times of day.

We found oncology on the third floor. I grabbed a queue number. Took a seat. Looked at the ceiling, which had become something of a habit in waiting rooms.

Here we are again.

The thing about this waiting room that was different from Dr Wilson's — different from every other waiting room I'd sat in over the past few months — was that here I knew exactly why everyone was in it. There was no uncertainty about that. Everyone in these particular chairs was here for the same general category of reason, and there was a strange, uncomfortable kinship in that. The mutual acknowledgment of people who have been let into the same difficult truth and now have to sit with it under fluorescent lighting.

I watched an older woman across from me, maybe sixty, reading a paperback with a spine creased from multiple reads. She turned a page without looking up. Patient. Settled into the rhythm of it.

I wondered if I'd get there.

I wondered if there was enough time to get there.

Probably not, said the part of my brain that had stopped softening things for me.

Noted, I said back to it. Now be quiet.

Dr Priya Nair was younger than I expected. Late thirties, maybe early forties, with the kind of direct manner that didn't read as unkind — just as someone who had decided, a long time ago, that the most respectful thing you can offer a patient is honesty delivered cleanly, without the cotton wool wrapped around it.

She reviewed my file thoroughly. She asked questions, some familiar, some new. She did a physical examination. She spoke with Momma and Aunt Reneta, and then turned back to me, and I had the clear impression that she was talking to me rather than about me, which had not always been my experience, and which mattered more than I could have explained.

"I've reviewed the reports from your doctor in London," she said. "And I want to be straightforward with you about where we are."

"Okay," I said.

"The disease has progressed. That's not unexpected given the timeline, but it does narrow some of the options we might otherwise consider." She paused, not for effect, just giving the words enough space to land. "What I want to do is start you on an induction regimen. The goal of induction is to achieve remission — to significantly reduce the leukaemia cell count. It won't eliminate the disease, but it can buy us time and potentially improve your quality of life in the meantime."

"And if it works?"

"If it works, we look at consolidation. Possibly a stem cell transplant, depending on how you respond. There are variables I can't predict yet." She looked at me steadily. "I want to be honest with you. I can't promise outcomes. What I can tell you is that I've seen patients with presentations comparable to yours respond better than their initial prognosis suggested. I've also seen the opposite. The honest answer is that we don't know yet, and the only way to know is to try."

We don't know yet.

I turned that over in my head while she kept talking.

It was, strangely, the most comforting thing any doctor had said to me in three months. Not because it was hopeful. But because it was true, and I was so tired of being given careful hope that was really just dressed-up helplessness. We don't know was real. We don't know left space for something. A door that hadn't been closed yet.

"When do we start?" I asked.

"Next week. A few more tests first, then we begin."

I nodded.

Under the table, Momma's hand found mine. I held it tightly and looked at the window and thought: okay. Okay. Next week. That's when this actually starts.

The afternoon went slowly.

Momma and Aunt Reneta talked on the way home, a low murmur from the front seat that I let drift over me without catching any of it. I sat in the back with my head against the window and watched Singapore move past. The green of it, still surprising me. The way something was always flowering, something was always spilling over a wall in a colour you didn't expect.

I didn't feel sad, exactly.

More like — emptied out. Like the appointment had required a particular kind of effort to be present in, to stay calm and ask the right questions and not let my face do anything my parents would feel responsible for, and now that it was over I had nothing left to maintain the performance with. Just tired. Quiet. Present in the particular boneless way of someone who has spent several hours bracing for impact and can finally unclench.

Back at the house, Isha asked how it went. I told her. She said okay in exactly the way she always said it, the word as a small act of solidarity rather than a response.

Then she left me alone, which was the right call.

I went upstairs. Sat on the bed. Picked up my phone and put it down and picked it up again.

My phone showed three missed calls from Lyla and a voice note from Enzo that was four minutes and thirty-two seconds long, which was either very good or very bad depending on what was in it.

I called Lyla back first.

She picked up on the second ring, which meant she'd been waiting.

"Okay hi, oh my god, how was it, are you okay, what did they say, tell me everything—"

"Lyla."

"—I've been checking my phone all morning, Enzo said I was being annoying about it but I was not being annoying I was being a concerned friend which is different—"

"Lyla."

"What."

"I'm okay."

A pause.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean — it's real. It's actually starting next week, the treatment. So that's — that's real now. But the doctor seems good. She's honest. I think I trust her."

Another pause, longer. I could hear Lyla breathing on the other end, the way she does when she's trying not to cry and is moderately succeeding.

"Okay," she said, quietly. Very un-Lyla in its quietness. "Okay. That's good. That she's honest."

"Yeah."

"Are you scared?"

I thought about it. The honest answer, for once.

"Not in the way I thought I'd be," I said. "It's more like. I know what's coming now, at least roughly, and knowing is easier than not knowing. The waiting was the worst part. At least now something's actually happening."

"That makes sense," Lyla said. "That totally makes sense." A beat. "How's Singapore?"

"Green," I said. "Warm. Strange in a good way."

"Have you done anything fun? Please tell me you've done something fun."

I thought about the reservoir at dusk. Kai's face. I want to remember this one.

"A few things," I said.

Something in my voice apparently communicated more than I intended, because Lyla went very still in the way she goes still when she's identified a piece of information she wants and is deciding how to approach it.

"A few things," she repeated.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"Olivia. Is there a person."

"There is not a person."

"Your voice did a thing."

"My voice did not do a thing, Lyla, I just had a hospital appointment, my voice is allowed to sound like things."

"It did a specific thing. A thing I recognise. I have known you for four years—"

"I have to go," I said. "I'll call you tomorrow."

"That is not a denial!"

I hung up.

I sat with my phone in my hand and listened to the house for a moment. Downstairs, Momma and Aunt Reneta were talking. A low, unrushed conversation, the kind that didn't used to exist between them and was now, cautiously, beginning to.

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

There is not a person, I told myself firmly.

But the problem with lying to yourself is that you know exactly what you're doing.

The thing I hadn't admitted to anyone, including Isha, was how much space Kai occupied in my head without being invited to.

It had started on the plane and hadn't stopped since. It wasn't infatuation, or not only that. It was more like — he had arrived in my life at the specific moment when I was trying very hard to feel nothing for anyone new, and had proceeded, through no particular effort of his own, to make that impossible. He was just there. In the garden in the morning. At the end of a text at seven am. Sitting across a table or walking beside me through the Botanic Gardens, saying something that made me laugh when I hadn't been planning to.

And I kept running into the same wall every time I followed the thought too far.

I was dying.

Not immediately, maybe. Not necessarily next month or the month after. But the trajectory was what it was, and I was not someone who lied to herself about trajectories. I had at best a year. Probably less if the treatment didn't work the way they hoped. And what was I supposed to do with that, exactly — let someone get close to me, let him get close to me, and then leave him with it? Leave him standing somewhere after I was gone, holding the specific weight of having loved someone who had known all along that she was leaving?

I'd seen what loss did to people. I'd watched it move through my family like weather, the way it changed the air in every room. I'd watched Papa's face in the hospital, Momma's hands at dinner, the particular quiet of a house that was trying to be ordinary around something that wasn't.

I was not going to do that to someone who hadn't signed up for it.

The argument was clean. Logical. It held together when I examined it.

The problem was that arguments, however clean, do not actually stop you from feeling things. They just make you feel them quietly, alone, looking at a ceiling in someone else's house while the afternoon light moves across the wall.

I thought about what Isha had said. Has anyone asked him what he thinks is fair.

I thought about the reservoir. That moment before her text, when the distance I usually kept had briefly gone, and I'd looked at him and he'd looked back and something had passed between us that I didn't have a word for and wasn't sure I was supposed to name.

I thought about Dr Nair's voice. We don't know yet.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

You are not allowed to want this, I thought. You don't get to start something you can't finish. That's not fair to him.

I thought it very clearly and meant it completely and then I reached for my phone anyway, because apparently the part of me that made decisions had stopped consulting the part of me that made arguments.

Kai had texted while I was on the phone with Lyla.

how'd it go today? (you don't have to answer that)

I stared at it for a long time.

He knew I'd had an appointment. I'd mentioned it briefly, two days ago, in passing, the way you mention things you're trying not to make too large. He hadn't asked about it since. And now here was this text, with its small bracket at the end, its deliberate offer of an exit if I needed one.

you don't have to answer that.

I thought about a person who noticed when you were holding something heavy and didn't try to take it from you, just stood near enough that you didn't have to hold it alone.

I typed back: it was okay. starting treatment next week.

Three dots appeared almost immediately.

Then: that's a big week.

yeah, I sent.

do you want to get out of the house for a bit tonight? no pressure. just a walk or something. fresh air, change of scenery.

I read it twice.

No mention of food. No plan. Just — a walk or something. Like he already knew that what I needed wasn't an occasion, just somewhere to put myself that wasn't the inside of my own head.

yeah, I typed. okay. give me an hour.

I put the phone down.

Outside the window the evening was coming in slowly, the sky shifting through its colours the way Singapore skies did, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world and knew it.

I watched it for a moment.

We don't know yet, I thought.

And then, very quietly, underneath that, the thought I'd been trying not to think all day:

I want more time. Not just to live. I want more time for this. Whatever this is.

I got up. Went to the mirror. Looked at myself for a moment, just looked, the way you do when you're trying to figure out what you're actually feeling by looking at the face that's feeling it.

I didn't have an answer.

But I picked up my jacket anyway.

Isha was at the top of the stairs when I came out.

She looked at the jacket. Looked at me. Said nothing, which with Isha communicated significantly more than words would have.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm literally not saying anything."

"Your face is saying things."

"My face is just a face."

I walked past her toward the stairs.

"Olivia," she said.

I stopped.

"You're allowed to," she said. Simply. Without drama. "That's all. You're allowed to."

I didn't answer.

I went downstairs, and out through the front door, into the warm dark of the evening, where Kai was already waiting by the gate.