The Chair Between Them

The therapy centre occupied the third floor of a building that looked as though it had once been something more practical and less careful.

From the street, it was just another low-rise tucked between a dental clinic and a stationery shop near Novena, its facade washed the colour of old paper, its windows darkened against the sun. The lift was small and slow and faintly smelled of metal warmed by too many hands. On the wall beside the buttons, someone had pasted a laminated notice reminding visitors not to leave brochures inside the cabin. It had the tired authority of a sentence no one had obeyed in months.

Rai stood in the lift with his hands in his pockets and watched the numbers change.

Two.

Then three.

Nadia stood beside him, close enough that he could feel the coolness of rain-dried air clinging to her sleeve, though neither of them had touched since she joined him in the lobby downstairs. She was wearing a muted green blouse today, the soft matte kind that made her look gentler than he suspected she felt, and dark trousers that sharpened the line of her posture. Her hair was down, not because she had styled it that way, he thought, but because she had not had the concentration to decide what would feel more composed.

In the mirrored panel above the lift rail, their reflections looked like two strangers who had agreed to attend the same obligation by coincidence.

No one seeing them would have guessed how much effort it had taken to arrive here.

The doors opened with a muted chime.

The corridor outside was carpeted in a colour somewhere between beige and surrender. The air-conditioning hummed softly overhead. A row of framed prints ran along one wall--abstract landscapes, all pale blues and blurred horizons, the sort of art chosen precisely because it could not offend anyone already carrying too much feeling. At the end of the corridor, a frosted glass door held the discreet lettering of the practice.

Rai looked at it, then at Nadia.

She was staring at the same door with the particular stillness of someone who had already talked herself into staying but had not yet updated her body.

"You can still run," he said.

Her mouth twitched, not quite becoming a smile. "That's a comforting thing to hear right before therapy."

"I'm being supportive."

"You're being irritating."

"That too."

The faintest exhale left her, almost a laugh, almost a necessary release of pressure. It was enough. They stepped forward together.

Inside, the reception area was small and carefully non-clinical. No antiseptic smell. No hard white lights. Instead there were low shelves of books, a water dispenser with paper cups stacked in a precise tower, two armchairs in muted grey, and a coffee table scattered with magazines that no one in emotional distress was ever going to read. A diffuser in the corner released something citrusy and mild into the room, a scent so professionally soothing it made Rai suspicious.

The receptionist looked up, smiled with the calm neutrality of someone trained not to put extra weight on other people's nerves, and asked for their names.

Rai answered first. Nadia's voice, when she said hers, sounded almost normal.

They were asked to take a seat.

Rai noticed the phrasing immediately.

Of course he did.

Take a seat.

As though seats were ever neutral anymore.

He chose the chair nearest the window. Nadia sat in the one beside it, though not directly beside, because there was a small side table between them holding a ceramic bowl of peppermints and a potted plant with glossy leaves. The distance was only architectural, but it changed the feeling anyway.

On the far wall, a clock ticked with quiet, expensive confidence.

Rai kept his eyes on it for a while.

Not because he cared how many minutes had passed, but because it was easier than looking at Nadia's hands.

She had clasped them together in her lap so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.

He noticed that too.

Of course he did.

One of the magazines on the table had a cover story about sleep routines. Another was about minimalist interiors. A third featured a woman smiling beside a headline that used the word balance in a way that suggested balance could be purchased with enough scented candles.

Nadia glanced at the magazines, then away. "It's very… beige."

Rai turned his head. "You say that like it's an accusation."

"It is an accusation." She kept her voice low, eyes on the diffuser in the corner. "Why do all therapy places look like they're afraid of colours?"

"So people don't have emotional breakthroughs at the sight of mustard yellow."

She huffed a laugh through her nose. "That was bad."

"It was excellent."

"It was not."

The exchange lasted less than half a minute, but it eased something in the room. Not enough to make either of them comfortable. Just enough to remind Rai that discomfort did not automatically mean disaster.

The receptionist called their names.

They followed her down a short hallway lined with closed doors. Somewhere behind one of them, a man was speaking in a low voice that did not carry words, only the shape of them. Another room was quiet except for the faint scrape of a chair leg against the floor.

The therapist waiting for them was a woman in her forties, maybe older, with steady eyes and the kind of expression that suggested she had long ago learned how not to be hurried by the emotional weather of strangers. Her office was warmer than the reception area, not in temperature but in texture. Beige walls, yes, but softened by shelves, a lamp instead of the overhead light, a rug in faded rust and cream. The window blinds were tilted half-open, letting in afternoon light that had gone gentle at the edges.

And there were two chairs.

That was the first thing Rai really saw.

Not the desk tucked against the wall. Not the tissue box placed with tactical subtlety on the side table. Not the notebook resting on the therapist's lap. Just the chairs.

They were set slightly apart and angled toward each other rather than toward the therapist. Not facing. Not avoiding. Just turned enough that conversation would have to acknowledge itself.

The sight of that small angle unsettled him more than he expected.

He felt Nadia notice it too. The air beside him shifted, as though her body had quietly registered the same private alarm.

"Wherever feels comfortable," the therapist said.

The lie of that sentence was almost impressive.

Rai let Nadia choose first.

She took the chair nearer the window.

He sat in the other.

The distance between them was not large. A person standing could have crossed it in a single step. But seated like this, with the chairs opening toward one another, it felt like a stretch of ground more exposed than space that much wider should have been.

The therapist introduced herself as Dr. Leong, though she invited them to call her Mei if they preferred. Rai immediately knew he would not. Nadia, polite by reflex, said "nice to meet you" in a voice that made it sound as though she were attending a job interview.

Dr. Leong smiled in a way that suggested she had met many versions of this exact voice before.

She began gently. Why they had come. What they hoped the sessions might help them understand. Whether either of them had done couples therapy before.

Rai answered that last question first. "No."

Nadia shook her head.

Then they both went quiet.

The silence was not hostile. It was almost worse than hostile. It was cooperative. Each waiting for the other to find a safe place to begin. Each aware of the performance of that waiting.

Dr. Leong folded one leg over the other and rested her notebook on her knee. "Perhaps," she said, "one of you can start by telling me what brought you here now."

Rai could feel Nadia hoping he would speak first.

He also knew she knew he knew.

There was something almost absurd about the number of calculations two people could make while saying nothing.

Finally, he said, "We knew each other years ago."

Dr. Leong's face did not change, but her pen began moving.

"That's one way to put it," Nadia said quietly.

Rai glanced at her.

She kept her gaze on the rug. "We were together," she added. "A long time ago."

"We broke up," Rai said.

Nadia's jaw moved slightly before she corrected him. "I left."

There it was.

Three sentences in, and already the room had found the bruise.

Dr. Leong let the correction settle instead of rushing to smooth it over. Rai appreciated that and resented it at the same time.

"And recently," she said, "you reconnected?"

"At a wedding," Nadia answered.

The therapist nodded once. "And since then?"

Rai leaned back in his chair, then immediately regretted the defensive shape of it and leaned forward again. "Since then we've been… trying."

"Trying what?"

He almost laughed.

It was such a reasonable question, and yet he hated how completely it exposed the uselessness of the word. Trying what. Trying again. Trying not to repeat the same damage. Trying to make the years between them less loud. Trying to understand whether love surviving in memory meant anything useful in the present.

Nadia answered before he did. "Trying to see if we can have some version of a relationship again without pretending the old one didn't happen."

Dr. Leong's gaze moved between them. "That sounds important. It also sounds careful."

"Careful is good," Rai said.

"Sometimes," she said mildly.

The quietness of the reply made it more effective than disagreement would have.

Nadia shifted in her chair. The fabric of her blouse caught the light at one shoulder, then settled. "We thought it might help to have…" She looked briefly embarrassed. "A space where things don't immediately turn into the same patterns."

"What are the same patterns?"

Nadia opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Rai watched her from the corner of his eye. He could almost see the different drafts assembling in her head, each one revised before it could reach her mouth.

He said, "Silence."

Dr. Leong looked at him. "Silence?"

"We're both good at it," he said. "In different ways."

Nadia exhaled slowly. "He goes quiet when he's hurt."

Rai kept his eyes on the lamp beside the bookshelf. "You say that like you don't."

She turned to him slightly. "I don't go quiet the same way you do."

"No," he said. "You go quiet like you're trying not to bleed on anyone."

The sentence landed harder than he intended. He saw it in the way her fingers tightened once around each other and then deliberately relaxed.

Dr. Leong did not interrupt.

That was what made the room difficult. It had no interest in rescuing them from the consequences of their own accuracy.

Nadia looked back at the therapist. "We both avoid saying things when we think they'll make the other person leave."

There it was again.

Leave.

The word moved through Rai's body with a speed he hated.

He kept his expression still.

Dr. Leong's pen paused. "And is leaving the central fear for both of you?"

Rai almost said obviously.

Instead, he said nothing.

Nadia's silence beside him was different. Not withholding. Listening to herself before she answered.

"I think so," she said at last.

Dr. Leong turned to Rai. "And for you?"

He looked at the chair opposite his. At Nadia's sleeve. At the thin space between the fronts of their shoes.

"Yes," he said.

The room remained quiet. No one rushed onward. No one rewarded honesty with relief.

It irritated him, how much he had not realised he wanted that.

Dr. Leong nodded slowly. "Then perhaps we should talk about what each of you means when you say that."

Nadia looked down at her hands.

Rai rubbed one thumb against the side of his index finger, an old habit he had never fully managed to stop.

The therapist turned to him first, maybe because his answer had sounded shorter. Maybe because his body looked braced enough to be interesting.

"When Nadia says she needs time," Dr. Leong asked, "or if she's late, or replies less quickly than usual… what happens in you?"

Rai hated how specific that was.

He also hated, immediately, that he knew exactly how to answer.

He stared at a point somewhere beyond the window blinds. "It depends."

Dr. Leong waited.

He let out a breath through his nose. "No, that's not true."

Nadia glanced at him. He felt it without looking back.

"It doesn't depend that much," he said. "My brain usually knows what's probably happening. Work. Family. Traffic. Life. Whatever." He shrugged once, sharp and small. "But that's not the first thing that reacts."

"What reacts first?"

He swallowed.

The question should not have been difficult. It was only a request for clarity. Yet he felt, absurdly, like someone being asked to unzip skin.

"My body," he said.

Dr. Leong's voice stayed gentle. "How?"

Rai let his eyes close for the briefest moment.

Then he answered because not answering would have been its own performance.

"It gets ahead of me," he said. "My chest goes tight. I check my phone too much. I start measuring tone in messages. I hear distance in completely normal things. And by the time logic catches up, I'm already…" He stopped.

"Already?"

He looked at Nadia now.

She was very still.

Not staring. Not panicking. Just holding herself with such careful concentration that he could feel how hard she was trying not to make this harder.

"Already there again," he said quietly.

The room didn't change, but something in it deepened.

Dr. Leong asked, "Where is 'there'?"

Rai laughed once without humour. "You really do make people say all of it."

Her expression did not shift. "Only the parts that matter."

He looked away from her.

The tissue box on the table had pale blue patterns on the side, tiny leaves or waves, he couldn't tell. Someone in an office somewhere had probably selected that design thinking it looked calming.

"When she's late," he said, voice flatter now because that was the only way to keep it steady, "or when she goes quiet, there's a part of me that stops being here. Not literally. I know where I am. I know how old I am. I know what year it is." He drew a breath and held it a second too long. "But it feels like I'm back in the version of myself who got left waiting and didn't even get the dignity of understanding it in real time."

Nadia made a sound beside him.

Not a word.

Not quite breath either.

Something smaller and more helpless.

Rai kept going because he had already opened the wound and there was no point pretending otherwise.

"It's humiliating," he said. "Not because she's doing anything wrong now. Most of the time she isn't. That's what makes it worse. It doesn't take much. That's all."

Dr. Leong said nothing for a moment.

When she finally spoke, her voice had lowered almost imperceptibly. "That sounds exhausting."

"It is."

"Do you tell Nadia when that happens?"

He almost laughed again. "Not usually."

"Why not?"

Because saying I know you're probably just on the MRT but some primitive part of me is already bracing for abandonment made him feel ridiculous. Because naming fear did not make it smaller; it made it visible. Because visibility was not safety.

He said, "Because it sounds unreasonable."

Before the therapist could reply, Nadia spoke.

"It doesn't sound unreasonable."

Rai turned to her.

She was looking at him now, openly, and there was no defence in her face. Only pain. Quiet, contained pain, the kind that did not ask to be comforted because it had already decided it did not deserve the trouble.

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

"I'm not saying it because we're here." Her fingers pressed once into the fabric of her trousers. "I mean it."

The room felt suddenly too warm.

Dr. Leong watched them both, then shifted slightly in her chair. "Nadia," she said, "what happens in you when you hear that?"

Nadia's gaze dropped at once.

Rai saw the line of her throat move as she swallowed.

At first he thought she might do what she usually did when cornered gently--choose precision over honesty, answer with something tidy enough to survive scrutiny.

Instead, she surprised him.

"It makes me feel sick," she said.

The words came out level, but the effort in them was visible.

Dr. Leong did not rush to interpret. "Sick because?"

Nadia's hands had found each other again. She loosened them deliberately, then placed them flat on her knees as if refusing herself the refuge of folding inward.

"Because I didn't know it was still happening in new ways," she said.

Rai looked at her properly then.

The phrase went through him with a different sort of ache than the last one had.

Still happening in new ways.

As though pain were a weather system learning fresh routes through familiar land.

Nadia kept her eyes on the rug. "I knew I hurt him," she said, voice quieter now. "I'm not…" She let out a breath. "I'm not naive enough to think the past is over because we sat in a café and managed not to ruin each other."

A corner of Dr. Leong's mouth moved, almost a smile, though her voice remained calm. "That's good insight."

"It doesn't feel very helpful," Nadia said.

"Insight rarely feels helpful while it's still opening things."

That was the sort of sentence Rai would normally have dismissed as therapy-language dressed up to sound profound. But there was something in the timing of it that kept him from rejecting it outright.

Nadia lifted her gaze a little. Not all the way to either of them. Somewhere between.

"I thought," she said slowly, "that if I was careful enough now, maybe I wouldn't keep hurting him."

Rai felt the old irritation stir. Not at her. At the familiar logic of self-erasure arriving in prettier clothes.

Dr. Leong heard it too, apparently. "Careful enough how?"

Nadia let out a breath that trembled on the edge of becoming visible. "By not asking for too much. By answering clearly. By not bringing too much emotion into small things. By…" She stopped.

"By?"

Nadia's mouth tightened.

When she continued, the sentence sounded like something dragged into light against its will.

"By not being difficult to choose."

There it was.

Rai stared at her.

He knew versions of that thought had been living in her. He had heard the outline of it in the park, in her carefulness, in the way she approached every conversation as if it might contain a hidden exam. But hearing it spoken so plainly did something different. It took all the small, maddening behaviours that had been frustrating him--the apologising, the overexplaining, the restraint so polished it almost became absence--and revealed the fear underneath them.

Not manipulation.

Not strategy.

Just terror in disciplined handwriting.

Dr. Leong looked between them. "And has that worked?"

Nadia's laugh was very soft and very sad. "Not really."

Rai spoke before he meant to. "No."

They both looked at him.

He had not planned to sound sharp. But the word had come out with a bluntness that belonged less to judgement than exhaustion.

He rubbed a hand once over his mouth, then dropped it. "It doesn't help," he said more carefully. "It just makes me feel like you're waiting for a punishment no one's actually giving you."

Nadia looked away.

Dr. Leong let the silence hold a beat before asking, "Punishment from whom?"

That question landed in the room with unusual weight.

Rai felt, suddenly, that there were several answers and none of them were simple.

From him.

From Nadia herself.

From the version of their history that kept insisting hurt needed accounting.

Nadia answered first, though not directly. "I don't think I deserve to come back and act like I'm the one who gets to be messy."

There was no self-pity in the sentence. That was what made it unbearable.

Dr. Leong regarded her steadily. "Why not?"

Nadia opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

The room held still around that failure. The soft lamp. The blinds. The rust-coloured rug. The tissue box waiting with infuriating optimism.

Rai realised he was holding his breath.

Finally, Nadia said, "Because I'm the one who left."

Three seconds passed.

Then Dr. Leong asked, very quietly, "And in your mind, leaving means what? That you lose the right to be hurt? To be angry? To need?"

Nadia's face changed so quickly Rai almost flinched.

There.

There was the centre of it.

Not because she broke. She didn't. Nadia didn't tend to break in visible ways. But her eyes widened and then narrowed slightly, not in resistance but in recognition so immediate it looked almost like being struck.

She looked at the window. At the shelf. At her own hands.

Anywhere but the therapist.

Anywhere but him.

When she finally answered, her voice had gone smaller.

"Yes."

The single word seemed to lower the whole room by an inch.

Rai stared at her.

He was no stranger to guilt. He had worn enough of it in other forms to recognise the smell. But this was worse than guilt. This was structure. Nadia had built a version of morality for herself in which the person who left first forfeited the right to be complicated afterwards.

No wonder every apology from her carried the weight of someone paying instalments on an old debt.

Dr. Leong made one note in her notebook, then looked up again. "That sounds lonely."

Nadia smiled, and the sight of it was almost more painful than if she had cried. "It is."

Silence followed.

This one was not empty. It was full of too much meaning trying to choose an order.

Rai looked at Nadia's chair.

At the angle of it.

At the fact that even now, even in this room built for honesty, they were not facing each other directly. Only turned enough that avoiding each other completely would have required effort.

He understood the design of that suddenly, and resented the therapist for it with irrational force.

Dr. Leong turned back to him. "You said earlier that your body reacts before your mind does. Nadia says she tries to make herself easier to choose. Both of those sound like survival strategies. But I'm curious about the word you used at the start."

Rai frowned. "Which word?"

"Forgiven."

He felt his spine go still.

Because yes. He had used it, hadn't he. Not in this room maybe--had he?--but in every conversation around the room, inside the entire shape of why they were here. The assumption that forgiveness was something already accomplished enough to proceed from.

Dr. Leong's voice remained even. "Have you forgiven Nadia?"

He gave the obvious answer first. "Yes."

She nodded as if noting a weather report. "And has forgiveness made you feel safe?"

The quietness of the question made it impossible to dodge with confidence.

Rai looked down.

His shoe had shifted slightly inward without him noticing. The tip now pointed toward Nadia's chair.

He stared at it as though the angle might answer for him.

"No," he said.

The word came out rougher than Nadia's had.

Dr. Leong did not look surprised. "Nadia?"

Nadia's gaze moved to him before she answered. It stayed there for only a second, but that second was enough to make him feel seen in a way he wasn't sure he had consented to.

"No," she said softly.

The therapist let that settle too. Rai was beginning to suspect that most of her skill lay in understanding exactly how long discomfort should be left alive before anyone was allowed to move on.

"So perhaps," she said, "forgiveness has happened in one way, but not in all the ways you need."

Rai's jaw tightened. "What does that mean?"

"It means saying 'I forgive you' can be morally true and emotionally incomplete."

He didn't answer.

Because infuriatingly, the sentence made sense.

Because another, worse possibility had already begun to form behind it.

Nadia spoke into the space before he could. "What if he forgave me because he thought he was supposed to?"

The room went very still.

Rai turned his head sharply.

Nadia was not looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on her own fingers, which had curled lightly around the edge of the chair seat now, not gripping, just anchoring.

Dr. Leong asked, "Supposed to by whom?"

Nadia gave a tiny shrug. "By himself. By being the kind of person who would. By… I don't know." She finally looked up, but not at Rai. "By wanting to be better than what happened."

That sentence struck closer than he wanted anything in this room to strike.

Because he had thought something like it before.

Not in those exact words. Not so neatly. But yes--there had been times, in the years after, when he had clung to the idea of forgiveness not because it soothed him, but because the alternative felt uglier. Smaller. Pettier. As if staying angry would let the abandonment keep shaping him long after it had already done enough.

He had wanted, sometimes desperately, to be the kind of man who was not defined by having been left.

What if that desire had disguised itself as grace before he was ready?

Dr. Leong looked at him now, and for once Rai disliked her less for asking what she asked next.

"Is there any truth in that?"

He didn't answer immediately.

Nadia stayed perfectly still beside him.

The room held.

Rai looked at the tissue box again and then, finally, at Nadia.

She met his gaze this time.

There was fear there, yes. But not only fear. Also a kind of terrible willingness. As if she knew the answer might hurt and had decided, at least in this room, to stop bargaining with pain before it arrived.

He loved her for that in the same second he resented the fact that he still could.

"Yes," he said.

Nadia inhaled sharply.

It was not loud. But in the quiet office it was enough.

Rai kept going because stopping would have been more cowardly.

"There's truth in it," he said, voice low. "I did forgive you. Or I wanted to. I wanted to stop carrying it like…" He shook his head once. "Like proof."

"Proof of what?" Dr. Leong asked.

"That it mattered," he said, the answer arriving before pride could revise it. "That what happened to me actually happened. That I wasn't stupid for being hurt by it."

The honesty of the sentence left a strange, clean silence after it.

Nadia's eyes had gone bright, though no tears fell.

Rai saw her mouth tremble once and steady itself.

Dr. Leong asked gently, "And if you fully let go of the anger?"

He laughed under his breath. "Then maybe the younger version of me went through all of that for nothing."

There it was.

The ugliest part.

The childish part, perhaps. The humiliating part. The part that made pain feel almost sacred because without it, what remained of the wound except the admission that it had changed you and no one was coming to undo that.

The therapist did not flinch from it.

Neither did Nadia.

That, somehow, was worse.

Nadia turned toward him more fully in her chair now, enough that if he had mirrored the movement they would have been almost facing each other.

"I never thought it was nothing," she said.

Rai closed his eyes for one second.

When he opened them again, she was still looking at him.

He wanted to say that wasn't the point. That private remorse did not alter lived abandonment. That both things could be true and still fail to meet. But there was something in her face that stopped him.

Not pleading.

Only grief.

Not just for him.

For both of them.

Dr. Leong intervened softly before the moment collapsed under its own weight. "Nadia, earlier you said you worry he may love the memory of you more than the person sitting here now. Can you say more about that?"

Rai blinked.

He hadn't expected that turn. Maybe because he had been too busy looking at his own wound to remember that she had one she kept hiding under cleaner language.

Nadia's eyes left him at last. She sat back a fraction, as though distance might help the sentence emerge.

"I think…" She shook her head once. "No. I know that when we first saw each other again, a lot of what we felt was tied to who we used to be. It couldn't not be."

Dr. Leong nodded.

Nadia stared at the edge of the rug. "And I'm scared that when that fades--when the emotional shock of seeing each other again fades, when the tenderness wears off a bit, when this stops feeling like some rare, fragile second chance--he'll look at me properly and realise I'm not worth all this work."

The words were plain. Unornamented. Which made them devastating.

Rai turned toward her without meaning to. "Nadia--"

She lifted one hand slightly, not to stop him rudely, but to hold the sentence in place long enough to finish it.

"I'm not saying that to make you reassure me," she said, still not looking at him. "I'm saying it because it's true."

Dr. Leong's voice remained quiet. "What makes you believe that?"

Nadia laughed once, small and brittle. "History?"

The therapist did not smile. "That's one answer. Is it the only one?"

Nadia's hand lowered back to her lap. "No." She swallowed. "The other answer is that I haven't really given him a reason not to."

That was when Rai spoke again.

"Stop."

Nadia looked up, startled.

The word had come out sharper than he meant. Not angry. Just immediate.

Dr. Leong said nothing.

Rai dragged a hand down his face and started over, quieter this time. "Don't do that."

"Do what?" Nadia asked.

"Turn everything into evidence against yourself."

She held his gaze. For once, she did not apologise for the instinct he was naming.

Instead she said, "Then tell me I'm wrong."

The room shifted.

Not because of volume. Because of precision.

Rai opened his mouth.

Closed it.

There were many things he could have said quickly.

You're wrong.

I don't think that.

You don't have to be scared.

But quick reassurance, he understood now with painful clarity, would not be the same as honesty. And honesty--this room demanded it, or at least punished the absence of it more effectively than most places.

So he didn't rush.

The pause hurt.

He saw it hurt.

Saw Nadia register the silence before she had the context for it. Saw the old instinct in her to retreat before judgement arrived.

Rai hated that he was the one putting that look on her face.

Still, he chose not to lie.

"I'm learning," he said slowly, "the difference between loving who you were and choosing who you are."

The words entered the room with no softness around them.

Nadia went very still.

Dr. Leong watched both of them without stepping in.

Rai kept his eyes on Nadia because looking away now would have made the sentence feel crueler.

"I do love you," he said, and the directness of it startled even him. "But I think part of what's hard is that memory can make things feel simple. And you're not simple."

A tiny, pained smile touched Nadia's mouth. "No."

"No," he agreed. "And neither am I."

The room stayed quiet.

But not empty.

Something had shifted. Not solved. Shifted.

The chairs felt different now. The angle between them less like a trap, more like an unwilling honesty. A position from which evasion required more work than staying.

Dr. Leong glanced down at her notebook, then back up. "That sounds like an important sentence," she said. "Not because it's romantic, but because it's specific. You're both trying to separate memory from present choice."

Rai almost said, Isn't that obvious?

But perhaps it hadn't been. Or perhaps obvious things only became useful once spoken aloud in rooms with beige walls and lamps designed to make pain behave.

The session slowed after that. Not because there was less to say, but because both of them had already peeled back enough for one afternoon. Dr. Leong asked about practical patterns--how often they saw each other, what usually triggered distance, whether either of them noticed physical cues before conflict. Rai admitted he became clipped in text before he realised he was angry. Nadia admitted she overexplained when she felt herself becoming difficult. Dr. Leong said both of those were forms of panic, not personality.

That irritated Rai too, mostly because it sounded true.

Near the end, the therapist set her notebook down.

"I'd like to suggest a small exercise," she said.

Rai immediately distrusted the word exercise in a room like this.

Nadia, on the other hand, looked as if she might produce a notebook and ask for bullet points.

Dr. Leong noticed neither reaction, or pretended not to. "Once a week, I want each of you to ask the other one difficult question. Not a cruel question. Not a trap. A real question. And when the other person answers, the rule is that you listen first. No immediate defence. No correction. No rescuing."

Rai leaned back slightly. "That sounds dangerous."

"It may be," she said. "But you already know what your safer habits cost."

That was annoyingly effective.

Nadia nodded before he did.

Of course she did.

The session ended with logistics--next appointment, payment, a reminder that discomfort after a first session was normal. Dr. Leong said this last part while looking at both of them, but Rai felt it land mostly on him.

He stood before Nadia did, then waited while she gathered her bag. Neither of them thanked the therapist with excessive sincerity, which he considered a small mercy.

The corridor outside the office felt cooler than before. The receptionist was speaking softly on the phone, her voice low and pleasant behind the desk. The abstract paintings along the wall looked even more determinedly harmless now.

They stepped into the lift together.

This time, neither of them spoke.

The doors closed.

The mirror returned their reflections to them.

Rai looked tired. Nadia looked composed in the particular way people looked just before the cost of composure arrived all at once.

The lift descended.

Three.

Then two.

The silence between them was not the same as the silences that used to injure them. Not yet. It still had danger in it. But it also had something else now--an awareness that both of them had heard the other say things too raw to be neatly folded away by evening.

The lobby doors slid open.

Outside, the light had turned pale gold with the approach of late afternoon. The sky was clear in patches and clouded in others, as if the weather itself had not finished processing something. Traffic moved past in patient streams. A delivery rider adjusted his helmet near the curb. Somewhere across the road, someone was frying garlic; the smell drifted over in warm, sharp waves.

Nadia stepped out beside him and stopped just beyond the shelter of the building awning.

For a moment, they stood without direction.

Then she drew a breath. "I'm sorry," she said.

The reflex of it was so immediate that Rai almost smiled, if only from exhaustion.

He looked at her. "For which part?"

Her mouth parted. Closed. She looked briefly annoyed at herself for how easy the habit remained. "That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"It isn't."

He let the corner of his mouth move anyway. Then, gentler, "Don't."

Nadia watched him. The city moved around them with complete indifference, people passing on the pavement, doors opening and closing, engines rising and fading.

"Don't what?" she asked.

"Don't apologise just because the room was hard."

Her eyes lowered for a second. "I wasn't apologising for the room."

He waited.

When she looked back up, the steadiness in her face was hard-won and fragile. "I was apologising because I didn't know I was still hurting you in new ways."

The sentence from inside the office sounded different here, without the rug and the lamp and the therapist's notebook to absorb some of its force.

Rai looked away toward the street.

A bus pulled up at the stop ahead, brakes sighing. A woman in office clothes hurried toward it, one hand flat over the top of her tote bag as she ran.

"You can't apologise for that every time it happens," he said.

Nadia was quiet.

Then: "I know."

He could hear the difference now between that I know and the others. This one did not mean please don't push further. It meant I hear what you're asking of me and I'm not sure yet if I know how to do it.

That was harder to resist.

Rai turned back to her.

There was colour high in her cheeks now, whether from the session or the heat outside he could not tell. The loose strands of hair around her face had begun to lift in the breeze from passing traffic. She looked, suddenly, less composed than she had in the office. More real. More tired.

It made what he was about to say feel riskier than it should have.

Still, he said it.

"What should we ask first?"

Nadia blinked. "What?"

"The exercise." He lifted one shoulder. "Once a week. Difficult question. No defending. Apparently we're doing homework now."

A tiny flash of humour returned to her face and was gone again. "You really hate that part."

"I hate being given assignments about my own feelings."

"That sounds like something a man in therapy would say."

"That's offensive."

For the first time since they left the office, she almost laughed.

The sound was brief, but it loosened the air between them by a fraction.

Rai looked at the pavement for a moment. At the small cracks darkened by old rain. At a brown leaf caught against the edge of the curb.

Then he looked up.

Nadia had gone still again, but not in alarm. In attention.

He realised she thought he was about to make a joke and then abandon the conversation there. A graceful exit. A kinder delay.

Instead, he asked, very quietly, "When did you stop believing I would choose you?"

The world did not go silent around them. Cars still passed. The bus still knelt and rose. Someone across the street laughed too loudly into a phone.

But inside the small space that sentence opened, everything narrowed.

Nadia stared at him.

Whatever answer she had braced for, it had not been that.

He saw the shock of it move through her before language returned. Saw her throat work once. Saw her fingers tighten around the strap of her bag.

Rai did not take it back.

He had asked.

And now the question stood between them in the late afternoon light, exact and waiting.

Nadia looked down.

Then up again.

Not ready.

Not gone.

The answer would not come here. Not on the pavement outside the therapy centre with strangers moving around them and the smell of garlic in the air and the shape of the session still fresh in their bodies.

But the question had been asked.

And for once, neither of them could pretend they did not know where the real wound had begun.