I found the photo on a Thursday morning, three days after the pavilion.

It had slipped out of the front pocket of my suitcase when I was looking for my earphones, one of those small square prints you get made at the pharmacy, the kind with the white border that curls slightly at the corners if you don't store them properly. I hadn't stored it properly.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it.

Liam and me, maybe five years ago, in Papa's kitchen. He was seventeen in this photo, which meant I was thirteen, which meant neither of us had any idea about anything yet and were both extremely confident anyway. He had one arm slung around my shoulders and was holding up a paratha with the other hand like he'd just won something. His hair was doing something that defied both gravity and good taste. He was grinning.

He was always grinning.

There is something genuinely unfair about the fact that I am the one sitting on a bed in Singapore with a blood cancer at eighteen, and Liam, who ate an entire bag of salted cashews for dinner on multiple occasions and once tried to climb onto the roof of our house to watch a meteor shower and slipped on the tiles and somehow survived, is the one the universe decided to remove early. The maths does not work. I've checked.

That was the thing about Liam that I never knew how to explain to people who hadn't met him, he wasn't grinning because things were good, necessarily, or because he was performing happiness. He just found the world genuinely interesting, constantly, and the grin was just what that looked like on his face. He was curious about everything in the way that some people are curious about some things. Restaurants, street signs, strangers on buses, the structural engineering of buildings he passed, the way light changed through a bus window at different speeds. He wanted to know how everything worked and why.

He'd wanted to be a journalist. Not the television kind, not the celebrity kind. The kind that went to the places things were happening and wrote about them in a way that made people understand what was actually at stake. He'd had a whole plan. He'd mapped out which publications he wanted to work for, in which order, and for how long, before eventually going independent. He'd talked about it the way Papa talked about recipes he'd been perfecting for years — with precision and warmth and the absolute certainty that it was going to work out, because why wouldn't it.

He was twenty when the accident happened.

A wet road, late November, a driver who walked away without a scratch. Liam had been on his way back from a night shift at the student paper, his first byline published that morning, a piece about a local housing dispute that had taken him three weeks to report properly. He'd texted me a photo of it at midnight. Look at that. My name in actual print.

I'd been asleep. I'd read the text in the morning.

I never replied to it.

That was the thing I carried. Not the loss, or not only the loss. The unreplied text. Three years and I still thought about it more than made sense. I knew, rationally, that it didn't matter. That he'd known I loved him, that one unread text at midnight was not the thing that defined what we were to each other.

But grief doesn't work with what you know rationally. It works with what it finds.

I held the photo for a long time in the quiet of the guest room.

Look at that. My name in actual print.

He'd had two years of his life past eighteen. Two years of doing the thing he'd meant to do, in the early, stumbling, first-draft way of someone who was just getting started. He hadn't finished. He hadn't got anywhere near finished. And yet.

And yet he'd been there. He'd been completely, entirely there. Wet road and night shift and first byline and text me a photo at midnight because he wanted someone to know. He'd used the time he had. He hadn't spent it being careful about what it might cost people when he was gone.

I looked at his face in the photo.

I'm sorry, I thought. I'm sorry I didn't text back. I'm sorry you didn't get more time. I'm sorry I've been spending mine being frightened of the wrong things.

I put the photo on the nightstand, face up.

Then I got up, and went next door.

I didn't have a plan.

This was intentional, in the sense that every time I'd tried to make a plan for this conversation it had collapsed into something rehearsed and hollow, and rehearsed and hollow was not what Kai deserved. He'd been around for three weeks now. He'd walked me through a city I didn't know. He'd sat in a pavilion and said whatever it is and meant it. He deserved the actual thing, not the managed version of it.

So I knocked on his door with no plan, which was either brave or chaotic, and I was aware that the difference between those two things was mostly a matter of how it turned out.

Also I was wearing the blue top again, which felt like it was doing a lot of work for a second time this week.

He answered quickly, in a t-shirt and shorts, clearly mid-something. His laptop was open on the kitchen table behind him, papers spread out beside it, a half-empty mug going cold.

"Hey," he said, and his face did that thing it had been doing since the pavilion, that slight shift when he saw me, something that hadn't been there before the kiss and was very much there now.

"Hi," I said. "Are you busy?"

"Not urgently." He stepped back from the door. "Come in."

His house was the same layout as Aunt Reneta's but felt different in the way of places shaped by the person who lived in them. Lived-in without being cluttered. Books in actual use rather than decoration. A print on the wall that was slightly crooked and looked like it had been that way long enough that he'd stopped seeing it. It smelled of coffee and something faintly woody, like a candle burned down to nothing days ago.

I stood in the middle of the kitchen and didn't sit down, which in retrospect communicated more than I intended.

He looked at me.

He could tell. I could see it in the way he put his mug down and gave me his full attention, the laptop forgotten. He'd always been good at reading the temperature of things.

"Kai," I started.

And then I stopped.

Because we'd been talking about something, on the walk over in my head, Liam and me, and the photograph, and look at that, my name in actual print, and somehow all of that had walked me to his door but now that I was standing in his kitchen it was just — large. The thing I'd been carrying. It was suddenly very large and very present and I couldn't find the entrance to it.

"Hey," he said, gently. He moved slightly closer. Not crowding. Just reducing the distance enough that I didn't feel alone in the room. "Take your time."

I looked at him.

I thought about the pavilion. The thirty seconds of forgetting everything. The way I'd pulled back and watched his face go careful and willing and open, and he'd said whatever it is and waited.

I thought about Liam's text. Look at that. My name in actual print. The wet road. The driver who walked away.

I thought about how Liam had not spent his two years being careful about what it might cost people when he was gone.

"I have Acute Myeloid Leukaemia," I said.

Just like that.

No preamble, no version of I need to tell you something, no careful setup. Just the sentence, dropped into the middle of his kitchen on a Thursday morning, landing where it landed.

In my head, I had imagined this moment approximately forty-seven times. In most versions I was calmer. In some versions I had a better opening line. In one version, which I'm not proud of, I'd imagined doing it over text, which is a terrible idea and I had correctly rejected it but the fact that I'd considered it says something about the state I was in.

None of the versions involved blurting it out over cold coffee with no preamble whatsoever.

And yet.

Kai went very still.

Not the polite still of someone processing social information. The deep still of someone absorbing something that has just changed the shape of what they understood.

I kept going, because stopping felt like it would make it worse.

"I was diagnosed three months ago. In London. The doctors there gave me about a year, maybe less, depending on how the treatment goes. That's why I'm here — Singapore General has a better oncology programme. I started treatment this week." I paused. "I've known since before the plane. Since before any of this."

Silence.

He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't fully read. Something was moving through it in stages, too complex and too fast to name each one.

"I didn't tell you because—" I stopped. Restarted. "Every time someone finds out, the way they look at me changes. And I didn't want that. Not from you. I wanted to just be a person for a while, to someone who didn't know, and you were—" My voice did something I hadn't given it permission to do. I pressed on through it. "You were that. So I kept it. And I know that wasn't fair. I know it changes things now and I'm sorry that I—"

"Stop," he said.

Quietly. Not harshly.

I stopped.

He crossed the kitchen in a few steps and then he was standing in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head slightly to look at him, and he looked at me for a long moment with the expression that had finally settled into something I could read.

Not pity. Not the careful walking-on-eggshells recalibration I'd been dreading. Not the thing that happened to people's faces when they suddenly saw you as something fragile.

Just — him. Looking at me the way he'd always looked at me.

"You've been carrying this the whole time," he said.

"Yes."

"Since the plane."

"Since before the plane."

He exhaled. Slowly. A long breath that seemed to come from somewhere deep.

"That's—" He stopped. Ran a hand through his hair. "That's a lot to carry alone."

"I know."

"Are you—" He started and stopped, seeming to reject several questions before he landed on something real. "How are you feeling. Right now. Today. Not the diagnosis, just — you."

I blinked.

No one had asked me that in exactly that way before. Not the medical version, not the how are you coping version. Just: how are you feeling, right now, today.

"Terrified," I said honestly. "That you're going to look at me differently now."

He looked at me.

"Am I?" he said.

"I don't know. Are you?"

He was quiet for a moment. Thinking, genuinely, the way he did when he wasn't going to give me a reflexive answer.

"You're still the same person who beat me at Uno four times on a plane and pretended it was luck," he said. "You're still the person who goes very still when the light does something interesting. You're still—" He stopped. His jaw tightened briefly, something working through him that he was holding onto. "You're still you, Olivia. I don't know how to look at you differently than that."

Something in my chest cracked along a line I hadn't known was there.

"I should have told you before the pavilion," I said. "I'm sorry. That wasn't—"

"Don't apologise for the pavilion," he said. Firmly. "Don't."

"Kai—"

"I mean it."

We looked at each other.

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere outside a bird was making its case loudly. A mynah, probably. Always something to argue about.

"What does the treatment involve," he said. Back to practical, grounding himself. Giving us both something to stand on.

"Induction chemotherapy first. A few weeks of that, then they reassess. If it works — if I respond well — there might be more options. A transplant, maybe." I paused. "It's a lot of waiting to find out."

He nodded. Processing. "And in the meantime."

"In the meantime I'm here. Living. Trying to." I looked at my hands. "That's what I came here to do, actually. Not just the treatment. I didn't want to spend whatever time I have in London being careful and managed and looked at like I was already leaving. I wanted to be somewhere new and just — be in it. For as long as I can."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I'm glad you came here," he said. "I know that's — given everything, I know that's a strange thing to say. But I am."

I looked up at him.

"Me too," I said.

He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, the same gesture as the pavilion, deliberate and slow, and this time I didn't pull back.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said quietly. "Just so you know. Whatever this is. I'm not going anywhere."

The thing about those words was that I knew, rationally, that he couldn't promise that. That he meant them fully and honestly and also had no idea what not going anywhere was actually going to look like in the weeks and months ahead. How bad the treatment might get. What I might look like going through it. What it would cost him to stay.

But I let myself have the words anyway.

Just for now. Just for this kitchen, this Thursday morning, this specific quality of light coming through his window that I was already trying to memorise.

"Okay," I said.

He dropped his hand but didn't move back.

We stood there for a moment in the altered geography of knowing each other truly, which felt both heavier and lighter than before, the way things do when you put down something you've been carrying for a long time and feel both the relief and the ache of it.

"Do you want coffee," he said eventually.

I laughed. Abrupt and genuine.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

He turned to the kitchen counter, and I sat down at the table next to his open laptop and his scattered papers, and outside the mynah made its opinion known to the neighbourhood, and the morning continued, as mornings do, with or without your permission.

I stayed for two hours.

He made the coffee badly, which I found oddly endearing given that he had an expensive-looking machine and clearly used it every day. Too strong, slightly bitter, the kind that makes your eyes widen on the first sip in a way you try to hide.

I didn't hide it fast enough.

"Too strong?" he said.

"It's fine."

"Your face said otherwise."

"My face was just adjusting."

He took the mug back, poured some out, added more water, handed it back. Didn't make a thing of it. Just fixed it.

I don't know why that particular small thing made my chest do what it did. Maybe because it was so ordinary. So entirely unbothered. Like we were just two people in a kitchen on a Thursday and one of them had made the coffee wrong and now it was fixed and we could carry on.

We talked about Liam. I hadn't planned to — it arrived naturally, the way things do when you've already told the biggest truth and the smaller ones stop feeling as guarded. I told him about the photo, the paratha, the first byline. The text I'd never replied to. The way Liam had this quality of being entirely present that I'd spent three years trying to understand and had only started to, maybe, in the past few weeks.

"He sounds like someone worth knowing," Kai said.

"He was," I said. "He really was. He also would have had an enormous amount of opinions about you specifically."

Kai raised an eyebrow. "Good or bad?"

"He would have asked you seventeen questions in the first ten minutes and then declared you decent. That was his version of good." I looked at my coffee. "He had this thing where he decided very quickly whether someone was worth his time and then committed completely. No in-between."

"And you?" Kai said. "Are you like that?"

I looked up.

He was watching me across the table with that expression of his, the one that wasn't demanding anything, just genuinely curious. Like he had all the time in the world and was happy to spend some of it understanding me better.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that he was very unfairly good at that. At making you feel like the thing you were saying actually mattered, like he'd put everything else down to hold it properly.

"I take longer," I said. "But once I decide, same thing."

Something shifted in his face. Small. But I caught it.

Kai was quiet for a moment. Then: "I think he'd be glad you came here."

I looked at him.

"I think he'd want you doing exactly this," he said. "Being somewhere. Trying things. Not spending it being careful."

I thought about the photograph on my nightstand. The grin, the paratha, the ridiculous hair.

Look at that. My name in actual print.

"Yeah," I said. "I think so too."

We sat there a little longer than two hours, in the end. Neither of us mentioned it. His laptop stayed closed. At some point he'd turned his chair so it was angled toward mine rather than the table, which he'd done without announcing it, and I'd noticed without saying anything, and we'd just let it be the thing it was.

At one point he said something that made me laugh hard enough to spill some of my badly-made-then-fixed coffee, and he looked so genuinely pleased about it that I had to look away before I did something embarrassing.

I left around midday, walking back through the small gap in the hedge that had become a habit without us deciding it would be. At the door to Aunt Reneta's house I stopped and looked back.

He was standing at his kitchen window with his coffee mug. When he saw me look he raised it slightly.

I raised my hand.

Went inside.

Upstairs, I picked up the photo from the nightstand. Looked at it one more time.

"Okay," I said to him. Out loud, which was something I hadn't done before.

"I'm trying."