The second round of treatment was harder than the first.

Dr Nair had warned me it would be. She'd said it plainly, the way she said everything, sitting across from me in her office with the scan results between us and her hands folded on the desk. The new protocol was more aggressive. My body would struggle with it more than it had the first time. There would be days that were significantly worse than anything I'd experienced in the induction round and I should prepare for that.

I had nodded and said okay and gone home and been entirely unprepared.

The fatigue this time was not the passive, heavy kind. It was active. It took things from me. It took my appetite first, then my concentration, then whole days that dissolved into a fog so thick I couldn't tell afterward whether I'd been awake or asleep or somewhere in between. I lost weight I didn't have to lose. My hair started falling, which I'd known was likely and had thought I was ready for, and turned out not to be ready for at all, standing in the bathroom one morning looking at what was left and feeling something that wasn't vanity exactly but was adjacent to it, the very human grief of watching your body change into something you don't recognise.

Kai came every day.

He didn't always stay long. Sometimes it was an hour, sometimes just enough time to bring something and check in and make sure I'd eaten and leave again before the visit became a burden. He had a sense for that, for the threshold between presence and too much, and he calibrated to it without being asked. On the bad days he sat in the armchair and read while I slept, and I would surface from the fog occasionally and see him there, book open, completely at ease in the chair, and feel something so steady and so large that I couldn't look at it directly.

On the better days we talked. About everything and nothing, the way we'd always talked, except that the everything was bigger now and the nothing was more precious. He told me more about his photography, about what he was trying to do with it, the specific quality of light he kept chasing. I told him about the things I'd been thinking about — Liam, mostly, and what it meant to pay attention, and whether I'd been doing enough of it. He listened the way he always listened, like it was the most important thing happening anywhere.

Papa arrived on a Thursday, three weeks after the call.

He appeared in the doorway of Aunt Reneta's living room with his carry-on bag and his slightly rumpled travel jacket and the expression of a man who had been on a very long flight and did not care at all about any of that. He looked at me on the sofa and I looked at him and neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then I said: "You came."

"Obviously," he said.

He put the bag down and came and sat beside me and put his arm around me, and I put my head on his shoulder the way I had when I was small, and we stayed like that for a while without talking.

Momma came in from the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. She looked at Papa with the expression of a woman who had been carrying something alone for months and had just felt someone else's hand on it.

"You're late," she said.

"I know," he said.

She came and sat on his other side.

The three of us sat on Aunt Reneta's sofa in Singapore and said nothing for a long time, and it was the most home I'd felt in months.

The date was Kai's idea.

He brought it up carefully, one of the better afternoons, sitting in the armchair while I was propped up with a book I wasn't really reading. He said he'd been thinking. He said he wanted to take me somewhere, a proper evening out, somewhere I hadn't been, if I had an okay enough day to manage it. He said it the way he offered most things, without pressure, with the little bracket at the end. If you feel up to it. We don't have to.

I looked at him over the top of the book.

"Where," I said.

He'd found a rooftop bar on the edge of the Marina Bay area, he said, that his friend had recommended, that had a view of the bay and the city and the water all at once. He'd read about it and thought of me, which was either very romantic or a very tactical move, given that I was constitutionally incapable of resisting a good view.

It was both, obviously.

"Okay," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Don't make a big thing of it," I said. "Or I'll change my mind."

"I wasn't going to make a big thing of it," he said, in the tone of someone who had been absolutely about to make a big thing of it and was now quietly revising.

It took me forty-five minutes to get ready, which was twice as long as it used to take and involved sitting on the edge of the bed for ten minutes in the middle because I got tired, which I didn't tell anyone about. I wore the green dress I'd brought from London that I'd been saving for a reason I hadn't known yet. I looked in the mirror for a long time. My face was thinner. My hair was shorter now, what remained of it, cut close because it had been easier than watching it go in pieces. I looked like someone who had been through something. Which I had.

I thought about putting a scarf over my hair and then didn't. This was my face. This was what I looked like right now. Kai had seen me at significantly worse.

He was waiting at the gate when I came out. He was wearing the dark shirt I liked, the one that made his shoulders look unreasonably good, which I was fairly sure he knew about and had chosen deliberately. He looked at me when I came through the hedge and his expression did that thing it did, the shift, the settling.

"You look beautiful," he said. Simply. Not performing it.

"You don't have to say that," I said.

"I know," he said. "That's why I said it."

I looked at him for a moment.

Then I took his hand and said: "Come on then."

The taxi took us along the waterfront road, the city spreading out on one side and the bay on the other, all of it lit and moving and alive in the specific way Singapore was alive at night, busy without being frantic, bright without being harsh. I sat with my head slightly against the window and watched it pass and thought about the first morning I'd seen this city, six in the morning from a taxi with Momma, green and strange and full of something I hadn't been able to name yet.

I could name it now, I thought. Or most of it.

The bar was on the thirty-second floor, open to the air on three sides, the Marina Bay skyline laid out below us like something that had been designed specifically to be looked at from here. The famous integrated resort and its rooftop pool in the distance, the lit towers of the financial district, the water catching everything and giving it back doubled. I stood at the railing when we arrived and just looked for a long moment before either of us said anything.

"Okay," I said. "You were right."

"I usually am," he said, coming to stand beside me. "You're only just noticing."

"Don't push it."

He laughed. I felt it more than heard it, his shoulder against mine at the railing.

We found a table near the edge. The air up here had a quality to it, cooler than the street, carrying the faint smell of the water far below. I had a juice, something with mango and something sharp that I couldn't name, and he had a beer, and we sat across from each other and the city was behind us and between us and everywhere, and I thought: this. This is the thing I want to remember. This specific table, this specific night, him across from me with the lights of Singapore reflected in his eyes.

We talked for a long time. The easy kind and the real kind, moving between them the way we did, the conversation finding its own level. He talked about what he wanted to do with his photography properly, not just as a side thing, as the actual thing. He'd been thinking about it seriously, he said. He'd been shooting more. He wanted to put a body of work together, something that meant something.

"You should," I said.

"I know," he said. "I think I needed someone to be annoyed at me for not doing it already."

"I wasn't annoyed."

"You were a little annoyed."

"I was encouraging," I said. "There's a difference."

"There was a tone," he said. "A very specific encouraging tone that communicated mild exasperation."

I smiled at him across the table.

He looked at me when I smiled. He always looked at me when I smiled, with the specific attention of someone cataloguing something. I'd noticed it early and noticed it every time and never said anything about it.

"What," I said.

"Nothing," he said. "Just looking."

"At what."

He considered it. Honest, the way he was honest.

"At you being here," he said. "At you being here and looking like that and being you. I'm looking at that."

I held his gaze across the table.

The city moved below us, patient and indifferent, and up here the air was soft and the light was warm and I thought about Dr Nair's voice, we don't know yet, and Papa's voice, you're still here tonight, and Liam's grin in a photograph on a nightstand, and the specific weight of the months that had brought me to this table, to this city, to this person looking at me like I was something worth the looking.

"Kai," I said.

"Yeah."

I took a breath.

"I love you," I said.

The words came out steadier than I expected. Not tentative. Not wrapped in anything. Just straight, the way I'd said my diagnosis in his kitchen eight weeks ago, the same quality of just dropping the true thing into the room and letting it land where it landed.

He went very still.

Not the shocked still. Something else. Something that looked, from across a small table on a rooftop in Singapore, like a man who had been carrying a word around for weeks and had just been given permission to put it down.

"I love you," he said. Like he'd been waiting to and hadn't been sure he was allowed to go first.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

Below us, Singapore kept going, the way it always did.

"Okay," I said softly.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. We didn't need to. The words had been said and they were in the air between us now and they were going to stay there, real and unretractable, which was frightening and exactly right.

He reached across the table and took my hand.

I turned mine over and held on.

We stayed until late, later than I'd planned, later than was probably sensible given how tired I was, and I didn't care at all. We walked along the waterfront after, slowly, his arm around my shoulders and my head tipped slightly toward him, moving through the warm night with nowhere particular to be, which was its own kind of luxury.

At one point he stopped and took a photo on his phone. Not of the skyline. Of me, looking out at the water, not knowing he was doing it. I turned and caught him and he looked entirely unrepentant.

"For the portfolio?" I said.

"For me," he said.

I looked at him for a moment.

"Send it to me," I said.

He did, right there, and I looked at it on my phone. A girl in a green dress looking at water in the dark, the city lit behind her. She looked like someone paying very close attention to something. She looked like someone trying to hold onto a moment that was already in the process of becoming memory.

She looked like someone who was here.

I saved it to my camera roll and put my phone away and took his hand again and we kept walking.

He walked me back to Aunt Reneta's gate sometime after midnight. The house was quiet, only one light still on in the kitchen, which meant Isha was up waiting and pretending she wasn't.

We stood at the gate for a moment.

"Thank you," I said. "For tonight."

"Thank you for coming," he said.

I looked up at him. The particular quality of him in the dark, this person who had shown up every day for months, who had sat in an armchair and read while I slept, who had fixed bad coffee and left a mango on the step and said I love youacross a table like he'd been waiting to say it properly.

I reached up and kissed him. Not the tentative kind. The full kind, both hands, present, choosing it.

He kissed me back the same way.

When we pulled back we were both quiet for a moment.

"Go inside," he said softly. "Sleep."

"You sound like Momma."

"Your Momma has good instincts."

I smiled. I stepped back toward the gate.

"Kai," I said.

"Yeah."

"I meant it."

He looked at me in the dark.

"I know," he said. "Me too."

I went inside.

Isha was in the kitchen, very obviously not waiting up, with a mug of tea she was studying with great concentration.

"Good night?" she said, without looking up.

"Really good," I said.

She looked up then. She looked at my face and whatever she saw there made her smile, the real one, the one she didn't always show.

"Good," she said. Simply.

I went upstairs.

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and touched my fingers to my mouth and thought about rooftops and green dresses and a man who looked at you like you were worth looking at even when you were thin and tired and losing your hair and going through something that was going to end in a way neither of you could talk around anymore.

I thought about how love was not a reward for being okay. It just showed up. In the middle of things. In the hardest version of your life. Completely unbothered by the circumstances.

I thought: this is what I came here for.

Not the treatment. Not the remission that didn't hold. Not the four months of trying to be brave about something I wasn't brave about.

This. Him. This city. This green dress. This specific night.

I thought: I would do it all again. Every single day of it.

And then I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in weeks.