Momma and Papa,

I've been trying to write this for three weeks and kept stopping because I didn't know how to start it without it sounding like something from a film. I still don't know how to start it. So I'm just going to write and you can forgive me for the parts that aren't as good as I wanted them to be.

First: I'm not sorry I came here. I know that might be a strange thing to lead with but I think it's the most important thing. I'm not sorry about Singapore. I'm not sorry about any of it. I came here to live in whatever time I had and that's what I did and I would do it again, every single day, without changing a thing. I need you to know that. I need you to not carry any version of the story where coming here was a mistake or where staying in London would have been better. It wouldn't have been. This was better. This was the right place.

Momma. You have been my whole life in a way I don't have words for. You came and sat beside me in every waiting room. You brought the biscuits I liked when I was seven. You tucked me in the night after the diagnosis like I was still small enough for that and it was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. I know it cost you things to be here, to leave your job, to be so far from home for so long. I know it cost you and you didn't once make me feel the weight of it. That's the kind of person you are. Don't stop being that person after I'm gone. You're too good at it.

And Momma. I'm so glad you and Aunt Reneta found each other again. I watched it happen from the corridor and I didn't tell you I was there and I'm not sorry about that either. You both deserved it. You deserved to have each other properly. Keep having each other. Please.

Papa. You kept your phone charged and near your body every single day. I found that out and I haven't stopped thinking about it. That's love, Papa. That's just exactly what love is. Thank you for coming when I called. Thank you for getting on a plane. Thank you for sitting on that sofa with Momma and not saying anything because there wasn't anything to say and you knew it. Thank you for calling me jaan.

Don't be sad for too long. I mean that. You are both allowed to be sad, deeply, for as long as you need to be, I'm not trying to rush you through it. But eventually. Not soon, just eventually. I want you to do the thing where life gets ordinary again. Where you watch television and argue about the dishes and burn pancakes and laugh at something small. I want that for you. I want you to get back to each other.

To Liam, wherever you are: I understand now. I really do. Being entirely there, right until you're not. I tried. I think I managed it, some of it, more than I would have if none of this had happened. Thank you for showing me what it looked like.

I love you. Both of you. More than I know how to write.

Olivia

P.S. The mango on the step was Kai. In case you were wondering.

I have been in the hospital for eleven days.

The room is on the fourth floor. There's a window that looks out over a small courtyard with a frangipani tree in it, which was blooming when they brought me in and is still blooming now. White flowers. I can see them if I turn my head to the left. I have spent a significant portion of eleven days turned to the left.

It's a Tuesday. I know this because the nurse who comes in the mornings, a woman named Priya who has a completely different Priya energy from Dr Nair, always says the day when she checks in. Good morning, Olivia. Tuesday today. Like anchoring me to the week is part of the treatment. Maybe it is.

I am tired in a way that has gone past fatigue into something else, something that doesn't have a word in English as far as I know. Not painful. Not frightening, not anymore. Just very, very still. Like my body has been running a very long race and has finally, quietly, decided it is done.

The room has been full all morning.

Momma is in the chair beside me, where she has spent most of eleven days, her wire-framed glasses on, a book in her lap that she hasn't turned a page of in two hours. Papa is on the other side, his hand over mine on the blanket, doing the thing where he just holds on. Aunt Reneta is in the chair near the window, straight-backed, still, the way she is when she is feeling something large and has decided to be a steady presence instead. Isha is on the small sofa along the wall, her laptop closed for once, just sitting. Lyla flew back when I told her I think soon, and arrived with red eyes she'd obviously cried on the plane and is not going to cry in this room, jaw set, holding herself together with the enormous and visible effort of someone who has decided this is what she can give me. Enzo is beside her, not saying anything, which with Enzo says everything.

And Kai is in the chair at the foot of the bed, where he has been every day, where he will be.

I look at all of them.

My people. Here, in this room, in Singapore, at the end of something that started in a hospital waiting room in London with a queue number forty-seven and a doctor who was sorry and a diagnosis that had felt, for a very long time, like the worst thing.

It was not the worst thing.

The worst thing would have been not coming. The worst thing would have been staying home, being careful, spending the time I had in managed grief for a future I wasn't going to have. The worst thing would have been not knowing any of these people the way I know them now, not having sat at that table with all of them, not having walked through the Botanic Gardens, not having stood at a railing over Marina Bay and said I love you like it was the simplest and most necessary thing in the world.

I did not do the worst thing.

I am very glad about that.

"You're smiling," Isha says, from the sofa.

"Am I," I say. My voice is quiet, slower than it used to be. But it's there.

"Yeah."

"I was thinking about something."

"What?"

I think about how to explain it. The whole of it. The airport, the plane, spending time with momma in dubai, the Uno cards, the soup on a Friday, the garden in the morning, the pavilion, the rooftop, the green dress, the photograph of a girl from the back standing in the light trying to hold onto something.

"Everything," I say. "I was thinking about everything."

The room is quiet.

Outside, somewhere beyond the window, a bird is making itself heard. I can't see it from here but I know the sound by now. A mynah, definitely. Always something to argue about.

I turn my head slightly on the pillow.

"Papa," I say.

"I'm here," he says immediately. His hand tightens over mine.

"I know," I say. "I just wanted to say it."

Momma's hand comes to rest on my hair, very gently, the way she did the night after the diagnosis, in my room in London, brushing the hair from my face. There isn't much hair now. But the gesture is the same.

The love is the same.

I close my eyes for a moment.

Open them.

The frangipani tree is still there. White flowers against the blue of the afternoon.

I think about the word Papa uses. Jaan. Life. I looked it up once, properly, after the call, wanting to know if it meant what I thought it meant. It did. Life. But also, in some uses, my life. Not just the concept. The specific, beloved, irreplaceable thing.

My life.

I think that's about right.

"Kai," I say.

He is there before I finish saying his name. Moving from the chair at the foot of the bed to beside me, taking the hand that Papa isn't holding. He looks at me. I look at him.

There is nothing left to manage between us. No distances, no unsaid things, no careful holding back. Just him, looking at me the way he has looked at me since the beginning. Like I am somewhere worth paying attention to.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi," he says. His voice is steady. It costs him something.

"The photos," I say. "The ones from the garden. The rooftop."

"I have them," he says.

"Do something with them. For the project. Whatever it becomes."

He nods. His jaw is tight.

"And the letter," I say. "On my phone. For you. You'll find it."

He looks at me.

"Okay," he says. Very quietly. "Okay."

I hold his hand and Papa's hand and feel Momma's hand in my hair and the room is full of the people I love and the frangipani tree is still blooming outside the window and I am so tired. Genuinely, completely tired. The good kind. The kind that means I used everything up.

I think about Liam.

I think: I get it now. I really get it.

I think about the mynah. Out there somewhere, making its case to the neighbourhood, same as every morning, completely unbothered by whether anyone is listening.

I think: I liked that about it.

The room is very warm.

The light through the window is doing something to the colour of things, going gold the way Singapore light does in the afternoon, the way it did on the very first morning I saw this city from a taxi window at six in the morning and thought something I didn't have a word for yet.

I have the word now.

It was always okay.

It was always, from the very beginning, going to be okay.

I think: I was here.

I think: I was completely, entirely here.

The light keeps going.

I go with it.