Kai's pov

The hardest part was the mornings.

Not the first morning, though that was its own thing entirely, a kind of grey nothing I moved through without really being in it. Not the second or the third. But the mornings that came after, when the shock had worn off enough that the day felt like a day again and my body expected things from it, and I would be halfway through making coffee before I remembered. Or I would hear something outside the window and turn to look and catch myself thinking, for a fraction of a second, that she'd be up already, sitting by her window with her hands around her cup, and then the fraction of a second would pass.

Those mornings were the hardest.

I'd been warned, I suppose. Not in so many words. Just by the general shape of knowing what was coming, the way you know and still aren't ready when it arrives. Eleven days in that hospital room. I knew the nurse's name and the view from the window and which hours the light came through at the right angle. I knew it was happening. I still wasn't ready.

I don't think you can be.

Marcus came the day after.

He showed up with food he'd cooked, which he'd never done before in the history of our friendship, which told me everything about what he thought I needed that words weren't going to reach. He put it in my fridge. He sat in my kitchen. He didn't try to say the right thing because there wasn't one and he knew it.

We sat there for a few hours.

At some point he said: "Tell me something about her."

So I told him about the Uno cards. The plane. The middle seat. The way she'd looked at Dubai's lights from the window like she was memorising them. I told him about the armchair, and the soup, and the anglerfish. The portfolio she'd looked up to page three and then tried to pretend she hadn't. The restaurant review from 2021 that I had, at some point in the last few months, read so many times I could quote sections of it.

He listened to all of it.

"She sounds like someone who paid very close attention," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "She really did."

I found her phone on the nightstand in the guest room at Aunt Reneta's three days later.

Isha had texted me about it, carefully, the way everyone was being careful around me now in a way I understood and found both touching and slightly exhausting. She said Olivia had mentioned a letter. She said she thought I should be the one to find it.

I went over in the evening, through the gap in the hedge that I still used without thinking about it, the way it had become so habitual that my body did it before my mind caught up. The guest room was quiet and cool. Someone had put fresh flowers on the windowsill. The photo was still on the nightstand, Liam in the kitchen with the paratha and the grin and the ridiculous hair, and I stood there for a moment and looked at it.

I picked up the phone.

The letter was in the notes app. Not titled anything. Just sitting there, the way she did things, without announcement.

I sat on the edge of the bed and read it.

I'm not going to write what it said. It was hers and it was mine and those are the two people it belongs to. What I will say is that it was very her. It was the same voice as the restaurant review, the same voice as the first morning in my kitchen when she dropped the diagnosis into the room and stood there. Direct. A little funny in places she probably didn't need to be funny but couldn't help it. Honest in the way she was always honest, which was completely and without performance.

She said some things I'd needed to hear.

She said some things that broke me open in a way I'm still putting back together.

At the end she said: go take the photographs, Kai. All of them. Make the thing. I want to see what you make of it, even if I can't.

I sat on the bed for a long time after that.

The frangipani tree outside was visible from the window. I hadn't known that until now. She'd been looking at that tree for however long she'd been in this room, this guest room that had become hers over months, and I hadn't known.

There was still so much I hadn't known.

I was going to spend a long time finding it, I thought. In the photographs, in the memories, in the places we'd been together. The way you keep learning someone after they're gone, from the traces they left in the world and in you.

I put her phone down carefully.

I went home.

The exhibition opened seven months later.

Marcus had pushed me toward it, gently and then less gently, with the patience of someone who understood that sometimes the thing you need to do and the thing you feel like doing are very different and the gap between them requires someone else's hand. I'd spent those seven months with the photographs, sorting through them, understanding what I had.

What I had was a lot.

The ones I'd thought were the project turned out to be only part of it. The portraits of strangers in hawker centres and the streets of Tiong Bahru and the reservoir at dusk. The tai chi man. The birds. The tree roots cracking the pavement. And woven through all of it, the photographs of her.

The girl from the back, standing in the Botanic Gardens with the light coming through above her.

The green dress at Marina Bay, not knowing she was being photographed, her whole body turned toward the water.

A dozen others. Small moments. Her hands around a cup the way her mother held hers. Her face turned toward a window in a hospital room, the frangipani tree just visible through the glass.

I printed them all.

I named the exhibition after something she'd said, the first time we went to the reservoir and she'd looked out at the water and the trees and the dying light and said, very quietly, almost to herself: I want to remember this one.

I Want To Remember This One.

The opening was on a Thursday evening, which felt right in a way I couldn't entirely explain.

Her family came. Her parents had flown in, which I hadn't expected and should have, because of course they had. Her mother stood in front of the photograph of the girl in the green dress at the waterfront for a very long time without saying anything. Her father put his hand on my shoulder when he saw me and didn't let go for a moment, and I understood that it wasn't only about the photographs.

Isha came. Lyla, who cried at three separate photographs and apologised for each one and then cried at a fourth. Enzo, who walked through the whole exhibition slowly and at the end said: "She would have had opinions about the sequencing."

"I know," I said.

"Specific ones."

"I know," I said. "I thought about that a lot while I was doing it."

He looked at me.

"Good," he said. Simply.

Marcus stood at the back, watching, with the expression he wore when something had turned out the way it was supposed to.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked at it all. The whole thing. Months of light and attention and the specific quality of a city that had given me something I hadn't expected to find, and the photographs of a person who had known how to be in it more fully than anyone I'd ever met.

I thought about a girl who had come to a city on the other side of the world to try not to die and had, in the process, figured out how to live in a way that most people spent their whole lives trying to approximate.

I thought about what she'd said in the letter.

I want to see what you make of it, even if I can't.

I looked around the room.

This, I thought. I made this.

I hope it's enough.

I still go to the reservoir sometimes, in the evenings, when the light is doing what it does.

I bring the camera. I stand at the section of the path where the trees open up and I look out at the water and I try to do what she did, which was to be there entirely, without going anywhere in my head, without letting the moment be already memory before it was finished happening.

I'm not as good at it as she was.

But I'm learning.

The city moves around me the way it always has, steady and unhurried, the light going gold and then soft and then gone, and I stand there until I can feel it properly, until I'm not somewhere else, until I'm just here, at the reservoir, in Singapore, with the camera and the evening and the water.

And sometimes, in those moments, I think I can almost hear a mynah somewhere in the trees.

Arguing its case.

Unbothered.

Entirely itself.

And I think: yeah. Me too.

I lift the camera.

I take the photograph.