He was leaning against the gate when I came out, not on his phone, just standing there in the way he had of occupying space without needing to fill it with anything. He'd changed from whatever he'd been wearing earlier into a dark t-shirt and he looked, annoyingly, very good in it, which I noted and then told myself I hadn't noted.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"You okay?"

"You keep asking me that."

"You keep giving me reasons to."

I didn't have a response to that, so I just fell into step beside him as he pushed off the gate and started walking. We went down the road under the trees, the streetlights coming through the branches in pieces, the air still warm but softer now that the sun was gone. Singapore at night smelled different from Singapore in the day — less green, more close, the heat of the day releasing itself slowly from the pavement.

We didn't talk for a bit.

This was something I'd noticed about Kai early and kept noticing: he was comfortable with silence in a way that most people weren't. He didn't rush to fill it, didn't perform being relaxed, didn't reach for his phone. He just walked and let the quiet be what it was, and somehow that made it easier to be in it.

"Where are we going?" I asked eventually.

"Nowhere specific. Just walking."

"That's not a plan."

"It's a completely valid plan."

"It's the absence of a plan."

"Sometimes that's better," he said. He glanced at me sideways. "You seem like someone who has a lot of plans."

"I used to," I said, before I could think about whether to.

He looked at me. Didn't push it. Just filed it somewhere and kept walking.

We ended up at a small park I hadn't been to before. Not the reservoir, something smaller — a few benches, a pavilion with its lights still on, an old angsana tree that had grown wide enough to make its own weather underneath it. We sat on the steps of the pavilion because the benches were damp from the afternoon's brief rain.

The park was mostly empty. A man walking a fat corgi in the distance. The sound of the main road beyond the trees, faint and constant, like white noise the city generated just to prove it was still there.

Kai stretched his legs out in front of him and tilted his head back, looking at the sky through the gaps in the pavilion roof.

"How bad was it today," he said. Not a question. Just making space for it.

I looked at the tree.

"It was — clarifying," I said. "Which is somehow worse than just bad. Bad I could handle. Clarifying means now I know exactly what's coming and I have to actually think about it."

"What's coming?"

I felt the wire of it. The line I kept not crossing.

"Treatment," I said. "Starting next week. It's going to be rough for a while."

He nodded slowly. "Are you scared?"

"I'm trying not to think about it long enough to be scared. Which is its own kind of scared, I think."

"Yeah," he said quietly. "That tracks."

He was looking at me now. Not with the pity face, not with the careful handling — just looking, the way he looked at things he found genuinely interesting. Like I was a place he was trying to understand the geography of.

I looked back.

This was the problem. This was the specific, recurring problem. Every time I let myself actually look at him, something in my chest did something I had no interest in examining too closely, and the careful argument I'd constructed — the logical, airtight, correct argument — started to develop hairline cracks.

"Can I ask you something," I said.

"Yeah."

"Do you do this with everyone? Just — show up. Walk people around. Text them at seven in the morning."

He considered it seriously, which I appreciated. He didn't laugh it off.

"No," he said. "Not really."

"Then why—"

"Because you seemed like you needed someone who wasn't going to treat you like something breakable," he said. Simply. Like it was obvious. "And I don't know what you're carrying, Olivia, I can tell there's something, but I figure you'll tell me when you want to. In the meantime I can just — be around."

I looked at him for a long moment.

He doesn't know, I thought. He's saying all of this and he doesn't know.

And underneath that, quieter: tell him. Just tell him. Right now.

I opened my mouth.

"You don't have to explain anything," he said. Not cutting me off. Just — offering the exit again, the way he did. That small bracket at the end of things. You don't have to.

And I took it. I closed my mouth. I looked back at the tree.

Not tonight, I thought. Not yet.

"Thank you," I said instead. "For being around."

"It's not a hardship," he said, and the way he said it was quiet enough that it landed differently than a joke would have. More like a fact he'd checked and was reporting.

The corgi in the distance barked once at something and then went back to waddling.

I laughed, and he laughed, and the tension shifted into something warmer, and I thought: this. This is the thing I don't know how to give up.

We stayed there longer than made sense for a walk.

We talked about things that were easy and things that weren't. He told me about his parents, who lived in the east of the island and called him every Sunday with the specific energy of people who wanted to ask if he was eating properly and were using family connection as cover. I told him about Papa's cooking, the stuffed potatoes, the Punjabi swearing when things burned, and he laughed in a way that made me feel like I'd given him something.

At some point he told me about a friend he'd lost in university. Not dramatically — just carefully, the way you tell someone something true when you've decided they're someone you can tell true things to. An accident. Two years ago. He'd been fine and then not fine and was now, he said, mostly fine again in the way that probably meant he'd learned to carry it differently rather than set it down.

I listened.

I thought about all the things I wasn't saying and the weight of them and the fact that he was sitting here telling me his true things while I was still holding mine back.

Tell him, said something in me.

Not tonight, said the part that was scared.

I was going to have to stop letting those two things argue and actually pick one.

At some point the pavilion light flickered and then went off, leaving us in the dimmer wash of the streetlights from the road. The park had gone fully quiet, the corgi man long gone. It was just the tree and the sound of the city past the edges of things.

He was closer than he'd been earlier. I wasn't sure when that had happened, the incremental way proximity shifts when two people have stopped monitoring it.

I was very aware of it.

I was very aware of him, specifically — the angle of his shoulder near mine, the way he was looking at me in the low light with an expression I was running out of ways to misread. There was nothing ambiguous about it. I'd been pretending there was for two weeks and I was running out of road.

"Olivia," he said.

Very quietly.

Just my name. But the way he said it.

I turned to look at him, which was a mistake, because the distance between us was small enough that turning to look at him meant we were suddenly much closer than I'd accounted for.

For a moment neither of us moved.

Don't, said the argument.

I know, said the rest of me. I know. I know.

He reached up and pushed a strand of hair back from my face, very slowly, like he was giving me every possible chance to move away. His fingers barely grazed my cheek. The lightest thing. And yet my entire nervous system registered it like a signal flare.

I didn't move away.

He kissed me.

It was soft at first, tentative, a question more than a statement. And then I kissed him back, which answered it, and it became something else — warmer, more certain, his hand moving from my face to the back of my neck and mine finding the fabric of his shirt without deciding to.

He kissed me and for a moment there was nothing else. No appointment next week. No file with my name on it. No countdown.

Just the warm dark and his hand at the back of my neck and the sound of the city past the trees.

Then it came back.

All of it, at once, the way water comes back into a held breath released.

I pulled back. Not far. Just back.

Not roughly. Just back.

He let me. His hand stilled but didn't drop.

We looked at each other.

His expression was open, a little unguarded in a way I hadn't seen before. Not confused, exactly. More like he was reading the situation carefully, waiting to understand what had just shifted.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be," he said immediately.

"I just—" I stopped. My hand was still loosely holding the fabric of his shirt. I made myself let go. "I can't. Right now. There's — I have to tell you something first. Before this becomes — before we—" I stopped again. Every sentence I started ran straight into the wall of the thing I hadn't said.

He waited. Patient as ever. That particular stillness of his.

"Not tonight," I said finally. "But I need to tell you something. And when I do it's going to change—" I stopped. "It'll change things."

His eyes moved over my face, carefully. Trying to read what was behind the words.

"Okay," he said, slowly. "Okay. Whenever you're ready."

I nodded.

We sat there for a moment longer, not quite touching, the space between us both smaller and larger than it had been all evening.

Then he said, very quietly: "For what it's worth. Whatever it is."

He didn't finish the sentence.

But I heard what he meant.

And that was somehow both the easiest and the most unbearable thing he could have said, so I looked at the tree and breathed, and tried to figure out how you tell someone something that will hurt them when they've just shown you, very clearly, that they're the kind of person who will try not to let it.

We walked home mostly in silence.

Not the easy silence from earlier. Something more careful, more aware, two people navigating a new and slightly altered geography between them. His arm brushed mine twice and both times felt deliberate and not deliberate at once, the way things are when you've crossed a line and can't quite decide whether to stay on the other side of it.

At the gate he stopped.

"Get some sleep," he said.

"Yeah."

He looked at me for a moment. The same look from the pavilion, a little softer now. "I meant what I said. Whenever you're ready."

I nodded. I couldn't trust my voice to do anything useful.

I went inside.

Isha was still up, sitting in the kitchen with a glass of water, and she looked at my face when I came in and read it the way she read most things, which was to say immediately and accurately.

She didn't say anything.

She got up, got another glass, filled it with water, and put it on the counter in front of me.

I drank it.

We stood there in the kitchen in the quiet of the house, and outside through the window I could see the light still on in the house next door.

"I'm going to tell him," I said.

Isha looked at the window. Then at me.

"Good," she said.

Just that.

I went upstairs. I lay down in the dark. I pressed my fingers to my mouth without thinking about it and then felt ridiculous and dropped my hand.

I thought about what Dr Nair had said. We don't know yet. I thought about the reservoir, the pavilion, the thirty seconds in which I had forgotten everything and what that forgetting had felt like. Like being let out of something. Like a room with a window finally opened.

I thought about his face when I'd pulled back. Open, careful, willing.

Whatever it is, he'd said.

I needed him to mean that.

I was terrified that he did.