Across the Table

Nadia's mother opened the door before Rai could knock a second time.

The first thing that reached him was the smell.

Fried shallots. Turmeric. Something slow-cooked with cinnamon and cardamom. Steamed rice just off the heat. The kind of home smell that arrived whole, not in separate notes, and made a place feel already occupied by care before anyone inside it spoke. Warm light spilled from the flat behind her, turning the corridor tiles gold. Somewhere deeper in the unit, a television was on low, and someone--probably Nadia's father--coughed the deliberate, practical cough of a man who did not like being reminded he was getting older.

"Aiyo, come in, come in," her mother said at once, stepping back with the bright energy of someone who had made up her mind to be welcoming and intended to honour that decision properly. "Why stand outside like a delivery man?"

Rai smiled despite himself and stepped inside with the paper bag of fruit he had brought from the market near the station.

"I brought this," he said, offering it with both hands.

"You also never listen," her mother replied with automatic affection. "Why bring things? We have enough food to feed the whole block."

But she took the bag anyway, peeking inside with the frank interest of a woman who liked knowing what people considered appropriate guest offerings. "Wah, these grapes look expensive. Nadia, see what he brought."

Nadia appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands on a tea towel.

She was not dressed for formality. That unsettled him in a different, quieter way.

At his parents' place, she had looked prepared, deliberate, carefully assembled for scrutiny. Here she wore a simple dark green blouse with the sleeves rolled twice and soft cream trousers, hair tied up in a loose knot with stray strands already escaping around her face from the heat of cooking. She looked tired, but not guarded in the same rigid way. More like someone carrying too many internal calculations while still moving through familiar rooms by instinct.

When she saw him, something softened immediately in her expression.

Not relief exactly.

Recognition, maybe.

The kind that did not need performance.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"You came early."

"Your mum opened the door before I had time to pretend I wasn't nervous."

That made her mouth twitch. "Then she was saving you."

"From what?" her mother called from the kitchen.

"From himself," Nadia answered, and for one brief second the old ease between them flashed out so clearly it almost felt like being watched by memory.

Her mother laughed. "Good. Come, put your bag there. Uncle is in the living room pretending he doesn't care whether the football starts on time."

"I care about punctuality," came her father's voice from inside.

"You care about noise," her mother corrected.

Rai followed the sound into the living room.

Nadia's family home was warmer than his in every visible sense. Same size, maybe smaller, but denser with evidence of use. A woven mat under the coffee table. Family photos lining the wall in frames that did not match because no one had ever felt the need to make memory coordinate itself. Cushions slightly flattened at the corners from long ownership. A standing fan beside the sofa even though the ceiling fan was already on. A bowl of individually wrapped sweets left permanently near the television remote as if no evening should be endured without sugar nearby.

Nadia's father rose from the sofa when Rai entered. He was wearing a pale blue polo shirt and dark slacks, glasses low on his nose, one hand still holding the remote as though hospitality did not require full disarmament.

"Rai," he said, nodding once.

"Uncle."

They shook hands.

The older man's grip was dry and firm and unembellished, the sort that did not overstate warmth but did not withhold it either. Rai had met him years ago, enough times to understand the man's manner if not always his internal weather. He was quieter than Nadia's mother, less quick to fill space. But his silence was not like Rai's father's silence. It held less judgement, more observation. He seemed like a man who preferred to take the measure of a room before deciding what to contribute to it.

"You found the place okay?" he asked.

"Yes, Uncle."

"Traffic?"

"Manageable."

"Good. Sit. Match hasn't started."

It was both invitation and explanation, which somehow made Rai less tense.

He sat.

From the kitchen, Nadia's mother called out, "Don't let him talk only about football. Ask him to help with the bowls."

Nadia appeared in the doorway again and jerked her head toward the dining area. "Come rescue me."

Rai stood immediately.

The dining table here was round.

That changed the whole emotional geometry of the evening before anyone had even sat down.

No sides.

No clear line dividing question from answer.

Just a polished wooden circle with a lazy Susan in the middle already crowded with dishes: ayam masak merah glistening red and fragrant, stir-fried long beans with dried shrimp, tofu with minced chicken, a bowl of clear soup with white radish and carrot, sambal in a small ceramic dish, rice in the cooker still kept warm in the kitchen. The overhead light cast a soft amber pool over everything, making the steam rising off the food look gentler than steam had any right to be.

Nadia handed him bowls to carry from the counter while her mother arranged spoons and adjusted plates by fractions as though the exact angle of a dish could influence the emotional success of the night.

"Your mother said your office is very busy," her mother said as she moved the sambal closer to the centre.

"She says that when I complain too much and she wants me to sound successful instead," Nadia muttered.

"I say it because it is true," her mother replied. Then to Rai, "She likes to act as though the whole company will collapse if she is not there."

"That is an exaggeration," Nadia said.

"Only a little."

Rai glanced at Nadia.

There was fondness in the exchange, but also an old script. He could hear the practiced edges of it--the daughter minimising, the mother both proud and faintly exasperated by that same minimisation. It was affectionate, yes. It was also habitual enough to tell him something about how Nadia had learned to take up space: usefully, modestly, and preferably with a joke ready before pride could embarrass anyone.

Dinner began with more softness than his family's had.

That did not mean it was easier.

Warmth, Rai discovered within fifteen minutes, could be its own kind of pressure when it came attached to history.

Nadia's mother served everyone before sitting down herself, ignoring Nadia's protests with the imperiousness of women who had fed families long enough to consider objections both inevitable and irrelevant. Her father asked Rai whether work had calmed down since the year-end rush. Nadia's mother urged him to take more chicken before he had finished his first piece. Nadia rolled her eyes at both of them and told Rai not to be fooled--her mother would judge his appetite no matter how much he ate, only the direction of the judgement would change.

"It's true," her mother said cheerfully. "If you eat too little, I think you don't like the food. If you eat too much, I think you are not taking care of your health. Either way I am a mother, I will have comments."

Rai laughed.

A real laugh this time, not the careful one people used to grease polite conversation.

Nadia saw it and smiled without quite meaning to.

For a while, the evening moved around food, neighbourhood gossip, a cousin's engagement, Nadia's aunt finally recovering from the blood pressure scare that had upended Chapter 5's dinner plans, and Rai's mother apparently sending greetings through three different people because older women did not believe in direct routes when networks of affection were available.

Her father asked Rai about football and accepted his answer without turning the conversation into a test. Her mother asked whether his office still made people stay too late on Fridays. Nadia complained about a colleague who scheduled meetings at 5:30 p.m. as if human beings did not have bodies or private lives. Her mother said that was why women lived longer. Her father said that was scientifically lazy. Nadia said it was emotionally true.

Again, from the outside, the evening might have looked easy.

But Rai was beginning to understand that pressure did not need coldness to exist.

It could also take the form of expectation wrapped in kindness. Of families who had already made room for you once and were now trying, with genuine decency, to decide whether the room they had reopened was wise.

The moment the dinner turned did not come sharply.

It came like water beginning to gather at the low points of a floor.

Nadia's mother was asking about his parents--whether his mother's knee had improved, whether his father was still pretending not to need reading glasses--when one of Nadia's uncles was mentioned by accident because he had recently seen Rai's father at the mosque.

"Oh yes," her mother said. "Small world. Everyone still connected somehow."

Her father took another spoonful of soup and said, with no special emphasis, "Second chances also make the world feel small."

No one reacted immediately.

The lazy Susan spun a fraction when Nadia reached for the long beans, and the ceramic dish of sambal clicked softly against the wood.

There it was.

Not a confrontation.

Not even a question.

Just a sentence laid quietly on the table to see who would claim it.

Nadia's shoulders went still.

Rai saw it because he had learned to.

Her mother, maybe sensing the shift, gave her husband a look that carried years of marital translation inside it. "Eat your soup," she said.

"I am eating my soup."

"You know what I mean."

Her father glanced at Rai then, not unkindly. "I only mean some things deserve seriousness."

Rai set down his spoon. "I know, Uncle."

Nadia looked at him quickly.

He kept his voice calm. "And I know it's fair for you to think that."

The older man nodded once, as though this was the answer he had been testing for.

Nadia's mother exhaled and reached for the rice scoop. "Your father always says difficult things as if he's commenting on weather."

"That is because difficult things are often factual," he said.

"That doesn't make timing irrelevant."

"I didn't say it did."

Nadia stared at her plate for a moment longer before lifting her head. "It's okay, Ma."

Rai felt something in himself stiffen at that.

Not because she had lied. Not because she was wrong to want peace.

But because he knew now, more clearly than he had at his own family's dinner, how quickly Nadia moved to make rooms easier at her own expense.

This time he did not let the sentence sit there alone.

"No," he said quietly. "It is okay for Uncle to mean it seriously. And it's okay if it feels serious to hear."

The words were simple.

Still, something changed in Nadia's face when he said them.

Not relief exactly.

Recognition.

A tiny loosening, as if some internal brace had realised it did not have to hold the full weight of the moment by itself.

Her father watched him with thoughtful, unreadable eyes. "Then I'll say it clearly," he said. "We like you, Rai. We always liked you. That isn't the problem."

Rai held his gaze. "I know."

"It's our daughter we worry about."

Nadia's mother murmured, "As if that needed saying."

But her tone was softer now, less corrective than resigned.

Of course it needed saying. Families always needed to say the obvious things aloud when obvious things contained fear.

Rai nodded slowly. "You should worry about her."

The sentence bought him the room's full attention.

He knew why. People expected defensiveness when fear was named. Counterarguments. Reassurance dressed as confidence.

Instead, he added, "If you didn't, I'd question that more."

Nadia looked at him then with an expression so unguarded it almost startled him. Not gratitude, not exactly. Something quieter and more exhausted.

Her mother's face softened openly this time. "Aiyo," she said under her breath, as if the sentence had gone and made the evening more complicated by being decent.

Her father leaned back slightly in his chair. "And do you worry about yourself?"

There it was.

The question under all the other questions.

Not whether Rai and Nadia still had history.

Not whether there was affection.

Whether either of them had learned enough to recognise their own danger before dragging the other back through it.

Rai could have answered cautiously.

Could have said something well-mannered about taking things slowly.

Could have offered the kind of practical reassurance families liked because it sounded like planning.

Instead he said, because the round table and the warmth of the room had made performance feel both possible and intolerable, "Yes."

No one spoke.

He looked down briefly at his bowl, then back up. "I worry that I'll think I'm being careful when really I'm just being late to things that matter."

Nadia's mother frowned faintly, as if already trying to interpret the sentence.

Her father, though, seemed to understand something in it. "Late how?"

Rai thought of the carpark after dinner at his own parents' home. Of Nadia saying, I needed you beside me in there. Of his own shame arriving only after the room had already asked too much of her.

He answered carefully. "Late to speak. Late to show up properly. Late to notice when my silence is making someone carry more than they should."

The room held that.

Nadia did not look at him now. But he could feel the fact of her listening with her whole body.

Her mother set down the rice scoop. "That is a very specific answer."

"It should be," he said.

And because the moment had gone tender enough to become dangerous, her mother immediately reached for the practical again. "Take more chicken," she said to nobody in particular.

The whole table breathed.

Food moved again. Bowls shifted. The lazy Susan turned. Her father said the sambal was too spicy because her mother had a reckless hand with chilli paste. Nadia said this from a man who thought black pepper was flirting with death. Her mother told them both to stop bullying old people. No one said old was accurate.

But under the resumed rhythm of dinner, Rai could feel something else developing.

A quieter kind of scrutiny.

Not toward him alone.

Toward Nadia too.

It showed not in direct challenge but in the kinds of questions her parents asked once the main fear had been aired. Whether she was sleeping enough. Whether work was still giving her headaches. Whether she had finally gone back to the dentist about the molar that only hurt when she was already stressed. Her mother noticed she was picking at her rice. Her father observed that she had said "it's fine" three times in twenty minutes.

Nadia deflected each comment with practiced ease.

Too practiced.

Rai saw it then with new clarity: her family's warmth had its own blind spot. They knew she was capable. Responsible. Considerate. They knew she could absorb strain and still appear functional at the table. And because they loved her inside that pattern, they also helped maintain it.

Not maliciously.

The gentlest harms rarely were.

At one point her mother reached to brush an imaginary grain of rice from Nadia's sleeve and said, "You always make people think you're okay when you're not."

The sentence was meant lightly.

It landed like diagnosis.

Nadia gave a quick smile. "That sounds dramatic."

Her father replied, "Only because it's true."

Rai saw something pass through Nadia's face then--so fast it almost escaped shape. Not anger. Not embarrassment.

Weariness.

The particular exhaustion of being known in one old way for so long that even accurate observations start to feel like cages.

He understood, suddenly and with uncomfortable force, that her guilt did not begin with him. Not entirely. He was not the inventor of her instinct to make herself manageable. He had only become one of the rooms in which that instinct learned how expensive it could be.

By the time dessert arrived--cut fruit, the pastries he had brought, and tea sweetened more generously than his own mother would have allowed--the dinner had crossed into a different register.

Still warm.

Still civil.

But honest enough now that each kindness felt weighted.

Her mother excused herself to the kitchen to refill the teapot. Nadia went after her automatically with empty cups despite being told twice to sit down. Her father followed the football highlights into the living room. Rai stood half a second later with a murmured offer to help clear plates, but Nadia's father waved him off with the remote.

"Sit. Unless you know where she keeps the good tea."

"I definitely don't."

"Then you'll only slow them down."

There was no insult in it.

Still, after a moment, Rai drifted toward the kitchen doorway anyway, pulled there less by duty than by the shape of Nadia's absence.

He stopped before entering.

Inside, Nadia stood at the sink rinsing cups while her mother dried them and set them on the rack. The overhead kitchen light was brighter than the dining room's, flattening the softness out of everything. Rai might have announced himself then, might have stepped in and made the moment ordinary.

He didn't.

Because her mother spoke first, and the tenderness in her voice made intrusion feel wrong.

"You don't have to keep standing so straight," she said.

Nadia's hands paused under the running water.

"What?"

"You know what." Her mother took a cup from her and dried it with the towel more slowly than necessary. "The whole evening, shoulders up here."

Rai could not see Nadia's face fully from the doorway. Only the line of her cheek and the back of her neck where a few fine hairs had escaped her knot. But he saw the way she exhaled.

"It was fine, Ma."

"Mm."

That single syllable carried maternal disbelief so complete it almost qualified as a language.

Her mother reached to turn down the tap, effectively forcing Nadia to stop washing cups if she wanted the conversation to move or end.

"You always do this," she said.

"Do what?"

"Act like being calm means being okay."

Nadia looked down at the wet cup in her hands. "I was okay."

"No."

Not loud.

Not harsh.

Just firm enough to be impossible to dismiss.

Rai felt the air in the doorway change.

There was no dramatic revelation here. No family secret surfacing in raised voices. Only a mother speaking from the long patience of having watched her daughter mislabel pain for years.

Nadia set the cup down carefully beside the sink. "I didn't want tonight to become a whole thing."

Her mother softened then, though not by much. "Everything becomes a whole thing if you keep holding it alone until it goes hard."

Rai thought, with a small private jolt, that this sounded uncomfortably like therapy and exactly unlike it at the same time.

Nadia's laugh was short and tired. "So now everybody has advice."

"Of course everybody has advice. We are family."

That should have ended it.

Instead her mother dried her hands, leaned one hip against the counter, and said more quietly, "I know you are trying."

Nadia did not answer.

"I also know," her mother continued, "that trying can become another way of punishing yourself if you are not careful."

Rai went very still.

In the brighter kitchen light, Nadia's profile had gone blank in the particular way faces sometimes did when someone has touched the centre of something painful and the body is deciding whether to shield it or yield.

"I'm not punishing myself," Nadia said.

Her mother gave her a look mothers had probably been perfecting since the invention of children. "Then what do you call refusing to let yourself be difficult for five minutes?"

Silence.

The hum of the refrigerator.

The faint television commentary from the living room.

A neighbour's gate clanging shut down the corridor.

Nadia pressed her palm lightly to the edge of the sink. "I'm just trying not to make everything worse."

"There is a difference," her mother said, "between keeping peace and disappearing."

The sentence moved through Rai with uncomfortable force.

Not because it was new.

Because it wasn't.

It only attached older language to something he had already seen too clearly.

He stepped back from the doorway then, not wanting to turn maternal tenderness into something witnessed. By the time Nadia and her mother came out with fresh tea, he was in the living room pretending to be more interested in football than he had ever been in his life.

The evening thinned after that.

Her father complained about a striker's decision-making. Her mother cut the pastries into smaller pieces no one had asked for. Nadia sat quieter than before, but not withdrawn. More like someone who had been named too accurately in one room and was still carrying the sound of it into the next.

When it grew late enough to leave, Rai stood with relief threaded through the fondness he genuinely felt for the household.

Her father walked him to the door while her mother fussed about packaging leftovers despite Nadia insisting there was no reason to send him home with containers as if he were a student living alone for the first time.

"You take," her mother said. "Otherwise we eat this again tomorrow and your father will act as if repetition is a human rights violation."

"It is," her father muttered.

Nadia rolled her eyes. "You've lived thirty years with this man. You know he'll complain even when he's happy."

"He learned from me," her mother said.

At the doorway, while Nadia was still in the kitchen finding lids for the containers, her father looked at Rai and said quietly, "She looks composed when she's hurting."

Rai met his gaze.

"I've noticed," he said.

The older man nodded once, as if that mattered. "Good. Then notice early."

It was not a threat.

It was worse than a threat.

It was trust being handed over in a form that knew exactly how easily trust could be mishandled.

Rai nodded. "I will."

Whether he sounded certain enough to deserve the answer, he didn't know.

Nadia insisted on walking him downstairs despite her mother saying the leftovers were too heavy and men were perfectly capable of finding lifts by themselves.

In the corridor outside the flat, the air was cooler, carrying the faint smell of rain from somewhere far off though the night remained dry. The fluorescent light above the lift made everything look slightly overexposed. Nadia stood beside him holding one of the containers because she had refused to let him carry all of them like a visiting dignitary.

For a moment neither spoke.

Then she said, "You survived."

He looked at her. "Is that what that was?"

"Mostly." Her mouth moved. "With side dishes."

The lift took too long to arrive, which made honesty feel more available than either of them might have preferred.

"Your parents are kind," he said.

Nadia leaned back against the corridor wall. "They are."

He hesitated, then added, "That doesn't make them easy."

This time she smiled properly. Tired, but proper. "No. It really doesn't."

The lift dinged. They got in.

Inside the mirrored walls, their reflections stood side by side with the mild discomfort of people seeing themselves from outside while still inside the same conversation. Rai held the containers awkwardly. Nadia kept one arm folded over herself, the other holding the extra box, posture neat even in exhaustion.

"I think your mum sees too much," he said.

Nadia laughed under her breath. "That's because she's been looking at me since before I had language."

The doors opened at the ground floor. They stepped into the block's open-air corridor leading toward the carpark and void deck, the warm night pressing in gently from all sides.

They stopped near one of the stone benches under the block because neither seemed ready to say goodnight yet.

From somewhere across the estate came the clatter of mahjong tiles and the burst of laughter that followed a winning hand. A bicycle rolled past, its basket rattling faintly. The air smelled of concrete, damp leaves, and somebody frying belacan in a unit above.

Rai set the food containers down on the bench so he could look at Nadia properly.

She had gone quieter again, but not closed. Her face was turned slightly toward the carpark lights, which caught in the loose strands around her temple.

He thought of her mother's sentence in the kitchen. Trying can become another way of punishing yourself.

Then another one followed it, from much earlier and far more painful.

I thought I'd lost the right to be hurt.

He had wanted to ask her about it before. Properly. Not in the middle of therapy where every sentence came preloaded with witnesses. Not at dinner tables where family concern distorted into caution. Here, maybe, with only the estate around them and night making honesty feel less performative.

So he asked.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

Nadia turned. "Tell you what?"

He knew the question sounded evasive. He also knew she knew exactly what he meant.

Still, he answered it carefully.

"That you were hurting too."

The night seemed to sharpen around the sentence.

Nadia's expression changed by degrees. Not shock. Not because the subject was unexpected.

Something more tired than that. As if he had finally put his finger on a bruise she had been carrying long enough to forget it was visible from the outside.

She looked away first, toward the lift lobby where the fluorescent light made the floor shine faintly. "My mum told you something?"

"Not directly."

That was not entirely true. Her mother had not said the sentence in plain form tonight, but the whole house had implied it. And part of him, perhaps unfairly, knew this conversation had been waiting for a real opening long before her mother's kitchen gave him one.

Nadia let out a small breath. "Of course she did."

Rai took one step closer, not enough to crowd her, just enough to keep the question from sounding like accusation shouted across a gap.

"I spent a long time," he said, "thinking I was the only one who kept carrying it after."

Nadia's eyes closed briefly.

When she opened them, there was no defensiveness there. Only that quiet, devastating steadiness she sometimes had when the truth was too old to dramatise.

"I know," she said.

He waited.

This time she didn't hide inside silence.

She looked at the bench instead of at him and said, voice low, "Because I left."

The sentence was simple.

He felt it land in him with the force of something not yet finished.

Nadia continued before he could interrupt. "I was the one who made the decision. I was the one who walked away. After that…" She pressed her lips together once, then forced herself onward. "After that, it felt obscene to act like I'd been wounded too."

Rai stared at her.

The word obscene hit him hardest. Not because it was dramatic. Because it wasn't. It was precise in a way that made the whole belief sound old and disciplined and deeply, terribly practiced.

"So you just…" He stopped, searched for a sentence that wouldn't collapse under its own anger. "You just decided you didn't get to have grief?"

Nadia gave a small shrug that looked painful. "I decided I didn't get to hand it back to you."

"That's not the same thing."

"I know." She looked at him then, and something in her face tightened. "But it became the same thing after a while."

The mahjong laughter rose again in the distance and died. Somewhere a toddler wailed once and was soothed almost immediately. The estate went on existing around them with the complete indifference of places that have witnessed too many private heartaches to distinguish one from another.

Rai felt an anger begin to move through him.

Not at her.

Not even only at the past.

At the terrible efficiency with which guilt could disguise itself as moral discipline.

"You should've told me," he said.

The moment the words left his mouth he heard their unfairness.

Nadia heard it too.

Her expression changed--not into defence, not quite, but into something more dangerous: hurt sharpened by restraint.

"Told you what, exactly?" she asked softly. "That I cried after I left you? That I ruined my own appetite? That I drafted messages and deleted them because every version sounded selfish? What would you have done with that then, Rai?"

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Because she was right in ways he did not want to examine too quickly. Because the younger version of him, the one still hot with fresh abandonment, might not have known what to do with her pain except misunderstand it. Because pain arriving from the person who caused yours did not automatically feel like comfort. Sometimes it felt like theft.

Nadia saw the thought cross his face and softened, just slightly.

"That's what I mean," she said more quietly. "I didn't think you were responsible for carrying my guilt on top of your hurt. And after enough time passed…" She looked away. "It started to feel like maybe I didn't have the right to say it at all."

The sentence brought them back to the centre of it.

Right.

Permission.

The old private law she had written for herself and obeyed long after it stopped making moral sense.

Rai rubbed a hand over his jaw. "That must have been lonely."

Nadia laughed once under her breath, and the sound was so thin it barely qualified as humour. "It was efficient."

He frowned. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I had for a while."

Silence settled.

This one was not hostile. Just too full of things neither of them could fix by naming. Rai thought of all the years in which he had imagined her absence as clean, decisive, survivable because at least it had seemed singular. Pain on one side. Distance on the other.

Now the whole picture was messier.

She had hurt him.

She had hurt too.

Those truths did not cancel. They did not even balance.

They only complicated the story he had told himself about who had been alone.

"I'm angry I never knew," he said finally.

Nadia's gaze moved back to him. "At me?"

"At the whole thing." He shook his head once. "At how much time got wasted because both of us were busy trying to carry the 'correct' version of suffering."

Her mouth softened, but sadness stayed put beneath it. "That sounds like something your therapist would enjoy."

"I hate that you're right."

"You hate most things that turn out to be emotionally accurate."

That pulled a breath of reluctant laughter out of him.

The sound changed the air enough that he risked another step toward gentleness.

"When your mum said you cried more than anyone knew--" He stopped.

Nadia looked at him steadily. "She shouldn't have said that."

"Maybe not."

"She worries in gossip-shaped sentences sometimes."

"That's not what that was."

Nadia seemed about to argue. Then stopped.

No, Rai thought. It wasn't. It had been a mother giving him a piece of her daughter's hidden hurt not as leverage, but as context. Not to absolve. To prevent simplification.

He looked at the stone bench. At the food containers waiting there in their ridiculous practicality, leftovers as evidence that family tenderness always needed somewhere to go.

Then he stepped forward and pulled one side of the bench's loose plastic chair--one that had been tucked against the wall nearby--closer.

The scraping sound drew Nadia's eyes downward.

He set the chair beside where he planned to sit on the bench.

Not opposite.

Beside.

Then he waited.

Nadia stared at the arrangement for a second as if the gesture had arrived in a language she understood before she was ready to answer it.

The estate light caught the side of her face. Rai could see the fatigue there, the thought, the caution that still lived in her no matter how many careful inches they had already crossed.

He sat first.

Not to pressure her.

Only to make the invitation less exposed.

For one long moment she didn't move.

Then, without being asked, Nadia crossed the small stretch of concrete and lowered herself into the chair beside him.

The movement was quiet.

Unceremonious.

And because of that, it felt more meaningful than if either of them had named it.

They sat facing the same direction now--toward the carpark lights, toward the opposite block, toward the ordinary Singapore night going on with its own business. Not each other. Not away.

Side by side, with the leftovers cooling between them on the bench and all the unfinished parts of the conversation still alive in the air.

Neither reached for the other.

Neither apologised.

After a while Nadia said, almost to the darkness in front of them, "I really did think I was protecting you."

Rai looked ahead too. "I know."

She drew one slow breath. "I don't think it worked."

"No," he said softly. "I don't think it did either."

That might have been cruel in a different tone.

Here it only felt true.

Nadia nodded once.

Then they let the silence stay, not because it was empty, but because it no longer needed immediate defence.

Somewhere above them, a wind chime sounded briefly from someone's corridor, thin and uncertain in the warm night air.

Rai sat beside her and thought that perhaps this was part of what the sequel had always been trying to learn: not just how to forgive, not just how to return, but how to let pain become shared information without turning it into a weapon or a debt.

Next to him, Nadia rested both hands lightly in her lap and did not fold herself smaller.

That, too, he noticed.

And this time, unlike earlier dinners, he did not arrive at the noticing too late.