The Right Height
34. Things had been surfacing. She wasn't sure when they started.
The flat was in Queenstown. Resale, a 3A HDB on a high floor. Eight months on the renovation, doing what architects do when they finally have a space entirely their own: built exactly what he wanted, without compromise, because there was no one to compromise with.
The door opened onto the living space. A low joinery panel just inside — laminate that read as stone, a bench, hooks. The floor was screed throughout, grey and level, the kind of material that looked found until you noticed how precisely it was finished. Shoes came off here. Bag went here. The week stayed here, outside.
The study was the first room. Semi-transparent glass where the old walls had been — frosted below, clear above. She could see in from the entrance whether she meant to or not. The desk ran the full length of the wall. Models on shelves. Drawings in flat files stacked below. When the glass was open the study became part of the living space. When closed it remained visible. The flat read as open. It did not feel it. Nothing in his flat was truly hidden except the bedroom and the wardrobe-store adjoining it.
The bedroom had invisible doors. She noticed it the first time she came — the door sitting flush with the wall, the same panel as everything else, no handle visible until you knew where to press. The only private thing he built.
Everything specified carefully — the tiles, the counter height, the extraction hood over the island. The pots hung on a rack the way pots did in magazines. She had never seen him cook anything that required more than one of them.
She set her bag on the counter and looked at the hanging pots.
He was still at the office. Running late, one hour maybe less.
She made tea. Sat on the floor of the living space with her cup, back against the couch, the city through the window doing its evening thing across the estate.
She thought about Kaia.
Coffee the week before. Kaia talking about her work — not complaining, just precise. The promotion she wouldn’t take. What came with it wasn’t nursing — it was the management layer, the paperwork, the politics, the institutional rules that needed following. The floor was what she kept by staying. The part that stopped Wen: Kaia hadn’t said it. The heaviness that came off her said it instead.
Wen had been sitting with that for a week.
The floor was for this.
She looked at her tea. She wasn’t sure yet what she meant by that. But she wrote it in the workshop and hadn’t crossed it out.
She picked up her phone. Not to do anything. Just to have something in her hand.
A live appeared in her feed. She recognised her before she understood why — the bags, the way she moved through the frame. The woman from the café. Wen watched without deciding to. She typed a question and got an answer she hadn’t expected. Then the live continued and she was no longer in it.
He arrived at nine. His sequence — shoes, bag, a pause at the entry she’d noticed he always took. Two breaths. Then the rest of the flat.
“Hey.” He bent to kiss her head, went to the kitchen for water. “Sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.”
“I’m always late.” He drank standing at the counter. “Did you have a good day?”
She told him what she’d been working on. The workshop — she was several weeks in, and something was grating. The words weren’t coming the way she’d expected. She felt stuck, like something needed to move but couldn’t find the direction yet. He listened the way he listened — one side of his attention on her, the other still at the office, the week not quite behind him despite the entry built for exactly this. He nodded at the right moments.
“Right, twelve weeks,” he said. “How many in are you?”
He didn’t know. She looked at her tea.
“I’m not saying that as a—” He stopped. “I just meant it’s a lot of evenings.”
“It’s fine,” she said.
He told her about his week. A project going sideways — the client had changed the brief after documentation was finalised. He talked about it the way he talked about work: precisely, with the particular animation of someone in their domain. She listened. She was good at listening. She did it all day.
Later, when the city outside had settled into its quieter self, she lay in the bedroom with its invisible door and looked at the ceiling.
The bedroom was the most itself of any room in the flat. No glass. No visibility. A space designed for one person’s sleep — the temperature he liked, the blackout curtains specified to the millimetre, the bedside table on his side exactly right.
She’d been noticing things. She wasn’t sure when they started surfacing.
Her side had a bedside table too. He’d added it when she started staying over.
It was the right height.
She wasn’t sure whose right height it was.