They accessed the port on a Monday.

That's what they called it. Accessing the port. Which sounded like something you did to a computer and not to a person, specifically to a person's chest, specifically to the small device they'd put under my skin the week before to make the chemotherapy easier to administer. The procedure to put it in had been quick and mostly fine and I'd spent the days after pressing my fingers against the slight raised shape of it under my collarbone, getting used to the fact that I now had hardware installed.

I was, in the loosest possible sense, a cyborg.

Liam would have found this hilarious.

The first infusion took about four hours. I sat in a recliner in a room with six other recliners, each occupied by someone at a different stage of a similar journey, and watched a clear liquid move slowly down a tube and into my chest, and tried to read a book, and failed to read the book, and watched the liquid instead.

Momma sat beside me the entire time.

She'd brought things. A small bag of things I hadn't asked for and wouldn't have thought to ask for. A travel pillow for the recliner, a light blanket because the room was cold, the specific biscuits I'd liked since I was seven that she'd found in a shop near the hospital. She didn't make a production of any of it. She just put them where they needed to be and sat down and opened her own book and was simply, solidly, there.

I looked at her at one point, sideways, while she was reading.

She had reading glasses now that she hadn't had when I was growing up. Small, wire-framed ones that she always looked slightly surprised to need. She'd put them on without thinking about it, and there she was, my mother, older than I'd been paying attention to, sitting beside me in a hospital recliner with a bag of my favourite biscuits and her wire-framed glasses, and I felt something enormous and uncomplicated move through me.

I looked back at my book.

I didn't say anything.

Sometimes love is too large to fit inside a sentence.

The side effects arrived on Wednesday, like a package you'd ordered and then forgotten about and didn't want when it came.

Nausea first. That low, persistent, deeply unglamorous kind that doesn't resolve into anything, just sits there making everything slightly worse. Then the fatigue, which was different from being tired. Being tired meant you needed sleep. Fatigue meant your body had simply decided it was no longer interested in participating at full capacity and wasn't taking requests. I slept for eleven hours one night and woke up more exhausted than before, which felt like a personal insult.

The nausea medication helped but made me foggy. I spent two days existing in a slightly pleasant haze where thoughts arrived slowly and then left before I could do anything with them. Isha sat on the end of my bed on Thursday evening and told me about her day at work, something complicated involving a colleague and a spreadsheet, and I nodded along and understood approximately every third word and found the whole thing oddly soothing, like listening to a radio station in a language you're just beginning to learn.

"You're not following any of this," she said.

"I'm following the tone," I said. "The tone is good."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she lay down on the other end of the bed, facing the ceiling, and just stayed there.

We didn't talk for a while.

"Thanks for staying," I said, eventually.

"Obviously," she said.

Kai came on Friday.

He'd texted every day since Monday. Not long texts, not demanding anything, just small ones. A funny thing he'd seen. A photo of the mynah from his window sitting on something it shouldn't have been sitting on. One text that was just a link to a very short video of a capybara sitting in a hot spring, with no explanation, which I'd watched four times and found deeply comforting.

On Friday he knocked on the door with two things: a container of soup from somewhere that smelled extraordinary, and a complete lack of any expression that suggested he was treating this as a significant occasion, which was exactly right.

"You don't have to bring things," I said, from the sofa where I'd been horizontal for most of the afternoon.

"I was making soup anyway," he said, which was almost certainly not true and we both knew it and neither of us said so.

He set it on the kitchen counter and came and sat on the armchair across from me, not the sofa, giving me the space I hadn't known I needed until he gave it to me.

"How bad is it," he said.

"On a scale of one to ten?"

"Sure."

"Oscillating between a four and a seven depending on the hour." I pulled the blanket Momma had brought slightly higher. "The nausea is the worst part. Everything else I can manage but the nausea is just boring. It's so boring. There's nothing interesting about feeling sick, it doesn't even have the decency to be dramatic."

He almost smiled. "What would dramatic look like?"

"I don't know. Fainting elegantly. Having significant thoughts. Instead I just lie here and watch television I can't follow and feel vaguely terrible and that's it."

"What are you watching?"

"I started a documentary about deep sea creatures and I don't remember any of it."

"The anglerfish one?"

"I genuinely couldn't tell you."

He reached over and picked up the remote from the coffee table and found it. It was in fact the anglerfish one. He turned it on, and we watched it together, me horizontal on the sofa and him in the armchair, and he made occasional quiet comments about the more ridiculous-looking creatures that made me laugh even when I didn't want to, and the soup was very good when I finally tried it two hours later, and that was a Friday.

That was what it looked like, the beginning of it. Not romantic in any cinematic sense. Just two people in a room, one of them sick, the other one staying.

The thing about having nothing to do but lie still is that your brain refuses to do the same.

It just keeps going. Turning things over. Replaying things in the particular obsessive way of a mind with too much time and too little distraction. And what it kept replaying, with a dedication I found both flattering and inconvenient, was him.

Not dramatically. Just small things. The specific way he'd handed me the soup container, both hands, like it was something that mattered. The way he'd sat in the armchair without explaining why, just chosen it, and I'd felt my whole body unknot a fraction without realising I'd been knotted. The sound of him laughing quietly at something on the documentary, not performing it, just actually finding it funny, and the way that had landed in the room like something warm.

I'd find myself lying there in the particular grey of three in the afternoon, half-medicated and half-asleep, turning these things over, and they'd stretch. The memory of the soup becoming a longer thought about his hands specifically, which were, objectively, very nice hands. Not that I was cataloguing them. I was simply someone with functional eyes who noticed things, and the thing I noticed was that they were nice hands, and that was just a fact about the world that I was storing neutrally.

And then the pavilion would arrive, uninvited, and the thirty seconds before I'd pulled back, and I'd feel something warm move through me that I then had to very deliberately put somewhere else.

I'd been doing this for two weeks by the time Isha noticed.

I didn't tell anyone about any of this.

Obviously.

But Isha kept giving me looks that suggested she had some idea, because Isha always had some idea, which was both her best quality and her most inconvenient one.

"You're smiling," she said one afternoon.

"I'm allowed to smile."

"At nothing."

"I was thinking about something funny."

"What?"

"The anglerfish documentary."

She stared at me with the expression of someone who was choosing, charitably, to let it go.

"Okay," she said.

"Thank you," I said.

"Sure," she said, and went back to her laptop, and I went back to absolutely not thinking about Kai's hands.

By the end of the third week, something had shifted.

Not in the disease. That was still doing what it was doing, the treatment still working its slow and unpleasant way through my system. But in me. Something fractionally lighter. I was sitting up more. The fog was thinning.

I texted him one morning without particularly planning to.

the anglerfish thing. the one where the male attaches to the female and just dissolves into her. that is genuinely one of the most unhinged things I have ever learned. who approved that evolutionary strategy.

Three dots appeared quickly.

natural selection was clearly having a day.

imagine being the first anglerfish that happened to. the absolute betrayal.

maybe he was into it, he sent back.

I stared at my phone.

kai.

what.

I'm telling you about the horrors of the deep sea and you're making it weird.

you brought up the dissolving.

I thought about it.

okay fair, I sent.

I put my phone down on the blanket and looked at the ceiling and felt something I hadn't felt in three weeks, which was approximately normal. Not happy, not fixed, not okay in any large sense. Just normal. Like a person lying in bed texting someone she liked about anglerfish, which was, objectively, a very ordinary thing to be doing.

I picked the phone back up.

for what it's worth, I typed. the soup was really good.

A pause.

I know, he sent back. I made it specifically for you.

I smiled at my phone for longer than was strictly dignified.

Outside, the mynah was at it again. Arguing its case loudly to the neighbourhood, the same as every morning, completely unbothered by whether anyone was listening.

I decided I liked that about it.

Kai's pov

I hadn't told anyone about Olivia.

Not Marcus, not my parents, not the group chat that had been demanding to know why I'd gone quiet. It wasn't that I was hiding it. More that I hadn't found the right shape for it yet. How do you explain someone who arrives sideways. On a plane of all places, in a middle seat, Uno cards in her carry-on. Then turns out to live next door. Then turns out to be carrying something this large, quietly, the whole time, while also making you laugh about anglerfish at seven in the morning.

I didn't have the words yet.

What I had was this: every time I thought about stepping back, the thought had no weight to it. It just sat there, inert, like an instruction written in a language I'd never learned. So I stopped trying to think it and just did the opposite instead.

I brought soup on Fridays. I texted small things because I'd noticed early on that small was easier to receive than large when you were tired and sick and didn't have the bandwidth for significance. I sat in the armchair when I visited because I'd seen her relax that first time when I gave her the space, and I'd filed it away and kept doing it.

I noticed things. I'd always been like this. Marcus called it the photographer thing, said I looked at people the way I looked at a frame before I took a shot, like I was checking the light and the angle before committing. He wasn't wrong. I just didn't usually do it this much.

The way she argued with herself out loud when she was deciding something, two or three words muttered under her breath like she was settling a debate. The way she read with her whole body slightly tilted toward the page. The way she said okay at the end of things when she'd made up her mind. A small, firm sound, nothing tentative about it.

The way she was funny. Not performing it, not trying to be liked. Just genuinely, precisely, observationally funny, the kind that came from paying extremely close attention to things and having strong feelings about what she found there. And the way the humour always landed right at the edge of whatever she was actually feeling, like she'd figured out she could use it to open a door into rooms she couldn't get into any other way.

I thought about the morning she'd knocked on my door. The blue top. The way she'd stood in the middle of my kitchen with something enormous clearly on the way, unable to find the entrance to it, until she just dropped it straight into the room.

I have Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

I'd gone very still.

And yeah. There was a moment. I'm not going to pretend there wasn't. Four seconds, maybe five, where some part of me understood exactly what was being offered and what it would cost, and wanted to find a reason to step back. I'm human. I know what it looks like when something has an ending already built in.

But then I looked at her face.

That specific expression. Terrified and already braced, like she'd been waiting for me to do the thing everyone eventually did, which was treat her like she was already leaving. Like she was a problem to be managed rather than a person to be with.

And the moment was over.

I just stood there wanting to make something easier. Whatever I could reach.

Marcus showed up on a Wednesday, which he did without warning because he'd had a key since university and considered advance notice a courtesy he extended selectively. He worked in architecture, currently on a project that was, by his own description, a disaster wrapped in a tender document, and he had the particular energy of someone who needed someone else's kitchen and someone else's problems for a few hours.

He was one of those people who took up exactly as much space as he needed and not a centimetre more. Tall, unhurried, with the specific confidence of someone who had been genuinely good at things for long enough that he didn't need to announce it. We'd met in the first week of university in the queue for registration, bonded over the shared discovery that both our assigned dormitory rooms smelled aggressively of paint, and had been friends ever since in the easy, undemonstrative way of people who don't need to perform the friendship to know it's there.

He made himself coffee. He sat at my counter. He looked at me with the expression he used when he'd already formed a theory and was giving me the opportunity to confirm it voluntarily.

"You're different lately," he said.

"I'm the same."

"You're really not." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "You seem settled. Which is strange because you just got back from eight months abroad, which usually makes you restless for weeks."

"Maybe I matured."

"Maybe," he said, in a tone that meant he didn't think so.

I said nothing.

He let the silence sit for a moment, which was one of the things I'd always appreciated about Marcus. He was comfortable with silence and didn't feel compelled to fill it prematurely.

"The girl next door," he said eventually. Not a question.

I didn't answer immediately.

"Kai."

"It's complicated," I said.

"Most things worth anything are." He took a sip of his coffee. "What's she like?"

I thought about it. The honest answer.

"Like someone who's paying very close attention," I said. "To everything. All the time. Like she's trying to memorise it."

Marcus looked at me for a moment.

"That's specific," he said.

"Yeah."

He turned his mug slowly on the counter. "Is she okay? The thing you said. Complicated."

I looked at the window.

"She's sick," I said. "She came here for treatment. It's serious."

Marcus was quiet.

"And you." He stopped. Started again. "How are you with that?"

It was a Marcus question. Straight to the thing most people circled around for twenty minutes first. It was why I'd told him rather than deflecting, which I absolutely could have done and a part of me had considered.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "I'm just here. Showing up. That's what I can do right now."

He nodded slowly. He didn't tell me to be careful, which some people would have. He didn't give me the speech about protecting myself, about not getting too involved in something that was already pointed in a difficult direction. He just nodded, and finished his coffee, and said: "She's lucky to have someone who shows up."

"I'm not doing it because she's lucky," I said.

He looked at me.

Smiled. Small and knowing and without any performance.

"I know," he said. "That's exactly what I mean."

He stayed another hour and we talked about his project, which genuinely was a disaster wrapped in a tender document, and I was glad he'd come, and I was glad he knew, and I went to sleep that night thinking about what it meant to pay close attention to something.

Thinking about what it meant to memorise things.

Thinking that I understood it, maybe, a little better than I had before.