Sometime in the Future
12. A kitchen tells the truth before the people in it do.
Karen had given him the address the week before. A condo at the edge of Toa Payoh, older than the new HDB going up around it, the kind that had been there long enough to stop trying to look like anything other than what it was.
He took the stairs. Old habit. The lift was fine but stairs told you things about a building — the width of them, the quality of the light at each landing, whether the space had been designed for people to actually move through or just to technically provide access between floors. These were good stairs. Wide enough. The light coming through the slits that provided air circulation, and ambient light. When he got to the top he noticed how the afternoon light flooded the landing, sitting at a low angle that made the dust visible.
She opened the door before he knocked.
“I heard the stairs,” she said.
She was in work clothes still, jacket off, the particular end-of-day looseness of someone who had been professional for ten hours and was allowing the edges to soften. She looked good. She always looked good in these suits — casual, present, the competence visible without being deployed. Her eyes found his face first.
Then she handed him a hard hat.
“Seriously?” he said.
“The contractor left it. Just wear it.”
He put it on. She laughed at him — quick, real, the laugh that arrived before she decided to have it — and led him inside.
The apartment was mid-renovation. Walls opened in places, the bones of it visible, wiring running where there had been plaster. The smell of concrete dust and something chemical, fresh paint somewhere deeper in. Boards laid over the floor where work had been done, the original tiles visible at the edges — old, patterned, the kind they didn’t make anymore.
“I’m keeping those,” she said, following his eyes.
“Hmm,” he said.
She walked him through it the way she’d been wanting to since the airport dinner — the bedroom, the study she was adding, the bathroom with the fittings she’d finally decided on after three rounds of samples. She talked about it with the particular energy of someone who had been making decisions alone for weeks and was relieved to have someone whose eye she trusted in the space.
He listened. Looked. Asked a question about the bathroom clearance that made her pull out her phone and check the contractor’s measurements.
Then they reached the kitchen.
It was the largest room. Not obviously — the proportions were subtle, the way good proportions are, the kind you feel before you calculate. The window was positioned for morning light. The counter ran long on one side, longer than a single person needed, longer than two people needed for the way two people usually used a kitchen. There was space for a table that hadn’t been chosen yet, in a corner that had been left deliberately open, a corner that would catch the afternoon light the way the rest of the kitchen caught the morning.
David stood in it for a moment.
He looked at the counter. The corner. The window. The way the space was organized around a use that wasn’t visible yet.
“You’re building for a family,” he said.
She went still.
Not dramatically. Just — a pause where movement had been. Her eyes on the corner with the afternoon light.
Then she said: “Sometime …in the future.”
Yes and not-yet and the question she didn’t ask sitting underneath both of those, in the space between them in this almost-kitchen with the dust and the patterned tiles and the window positioned for morning light.
He stood there a moment longer.
She showed him where she was thinking of putting the island. He said move it six inches toward the window. She looked at the space and saw immediately that he was right and didn’t say so, just made a note on her phone.
They left the hard hats at the door.
The restaurant was nearby. The kind of place that had been there for years and didn’t need to advertise — a shophouse, the signage faded, the tables closer together than current regulations would probably allow, the menu laminated and unchanged. She ordered without looking at it. He looked at it briefly and let her order for him again.
She noticed but didn’t say anything.
The food came quickly. Soup first, then rice, then the dishes arriving in the unhurried way of a kitchen that knew what it was doing.
They talked about her week. The client who had finally approved the campaign after three rounds of changes that had returned it almost exactly to the first version. The colleague situation, which had developed a new dimension involving a group chat she hadn’t been added to. She was funny about it, sharper than the situation warranted, and he laughed in the right places.
He was present. She could feel that. Whatever had been different at the airport dinner, whatever she’d filed without naming — tonight he was here, in this restaurant, eating the food she’d ordered for him, laughing at the right places.
And also somewhere else.
Not far. Not gone. Just — the way a room is when a window is open. Still the same room. Just with something moving through it that wasn’t there before.
She topped up his tea.
“I’m going to Chiang Mai next week,” he said.
She looked up.
“Godma,” he said. “Two weeks. I’ll work remote.”
She held the teapot for a moment. Set it down.
“That sounds good,” she said. “You haven’t seen her in a while.”
“I haven’t seen her in two years,” he said.
She nodded. Picked up her chopsticks.
“Give Lina my love,” she said. “Tell her I still have the scarf.”
“She’ll ask about it,” he said.
“I know she will.”
They ate.
She didn’t ask if she could come. He didn’t say she couldn’t. The not-being-invited sat between them.
She filed it.
The same folder. The menu he didn’t open. The airport dinner. The kitchen corner with the afternoon light.
The folder that didn’t have a name yet.
After dinner he walked her back to the building. She had contractor samples to go through before tomorrow. He had an early morning. They stood at the entrance the way they sometimes stood at the end of evenings — close, familiar, the ease of two people who knew each other’s weight.
She hugged him.
He held on.
“Two weeks isn’t long,” she said into his shoulder.
“No,” he said.
She pulled back. Looked at his face the way she’d been looking at it since the airport. Reading it. Finding what was there and what wasn’t.
“Okay,” she said.
He waited until she was inside.
Then he walked to where he’d parked and sat in the car for a moment before starting it. The building in front of him, her light going on somewhere on the fourth floor, the surroundings doing what it did at this hour — settling into its evening self, unhurried, indifferent.
He thought about the kitchen.
The counter that ran too long for two people. The corner with the afternoon light. The space organized around a future she was building toward with the same quiet certainty she brought to everything.
Sometime in the future.
He started the car.