The Writing Night
39. The love was in the not-needing-to-look.
It was the end of the week.
She closed her laptop at half past five and the Friday was done. People got up to go in stages. She sat for a moment before she stood. Her shoulders registered the release.
She felt grateful that she was not required to be anywhere.
She stretched — arms up, spine long. She had been carrying something since Tuesday. Not heavily — it didn’t press. It had stayed with her. Under the Wednesday meetings, the Thursday commute, the Friday forms.
She picked up her bag.
Her body was tired in the ordinary way — the week on top of Tuesday. But underneath the tiredness something else was running. A rev in the body. Like it already knew where it was going.
She went to catch the bus.
She texted Han Qin from the bus.
Not coming over tonight. Want to finish a piece of writing.
He replied before she reached her stop. Ok. Then: tomorrow?
She put the phone in her bag. She watched the estate lights through the window.
In her room she changed out of her work clothes and sat on the bed with her back against the headboard. The ceiling fan turned. She looked at her phone.
She found herself thinking about Kaia.
She opened a message and typed: what are you doing tomorrow?
She sent it before she could think about why she was asking.
Then she saw Amandha’s message from that afternoon — Sunday brunch? You home? Walk down together? — and she typed back: Yes. I’ll walk on my own — want to take my time. See you there.
She put the phone on the bedside table face-up. She watched it. Kaia’s reply came in three minutes.
Nothing. Yoga maybe. Why?
Wen looked at this for a moment. She typed: just asking. Then deleted it. Typed: thought we could meet. Kept that one. Sent it.
She put the phone down. She sat with the quiet for a moment. Then she opened her notebook.
She wrote for twenty minutes before she stopped.
She had the opening. She had her cousin’s line — study hard, get good job, you’re made — and her notes from Tuesday. The shape of what she was trying to do with it. But she kept reaching for the ground underneath and not finding it. Something specific. Something that would hold the argument in place so it didn’t float.
She turned to a fresh page on the right side and drew a line down the middle.
Left side: the numbers.
She did it lying down, notebook propped on her knees. Not a formal accounting. More like checking if the thing she was thinking was actually true.
Gross: $3,000
CPF out: $600
Cash: $2,400
She worked through it. The flat and its repayments. What the savings account absorbed, what cash still had to cover. She did the son’s pocket money — two hundred a month. She did the food, the transport, the phone bills, the WiFi. The insurance for two people, the doc fees in 2025, the dental spread monthly, the groceries that weren’t covered by eating out. The Milo. The bread.
She subtracted it out. Each line taken away from the cash. She scratched out twice where she’d written the wrong number.
She wrote what was left.
She lay back against the headboard and looked at it.
$12.
She held that for a while. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her forefinger, once. Outside the window: the estate. Another block like this one. Lights on in some rooms, dark in others. All of it built by the same logic, paid off by the same instruction.
She thought about her cousin’s smile when he said it. The smile that had already done its grieving.
Her mother knocked and came in without waiting for an answer, which was how her mother always did it. She was carrying a bowl of barley water. Still slightly steaming.
“Hot these days,” her mother said. She set the bowl on the bedside table, glanced at the notebook, did not ask. “Drink while it’s warm.”
“Okay, Ma.”
Her mother looked at her for a moment — the look she had that wasn’t quite a question — and then she left, pulling the door most of the way closed.
Wen looked at the bowl. The barley. The faint sweetness of it in the air.
Her phone buzzed.
Kaia: finishing night shift. going to sleep in the day. up by 3 — dinner instead?
Night shift. Kaia on a bus home at eight in the morning, the corridor behind her, sleeping through the afternoon. Up at three.
Wen typed: ok. where?
She put the phone face-down on the mattress. She sat with the quiet. The fan. The estate outside. The barley cooling.
She reached for the notebook.
She checked the time. 9.30pm.
She opened to the essay page and settled.
She spread what she had beside her.
The notes from Tuesday: the floor sentences, the Thursday woman and her cup turning in her hands, the eleven-year woman walking through the glass door for the last time. On a separate page — Kaia’s piece from the workshop.
What doesn’t transfer is not in the notes. It transfers anyway.
She had written it down after the session.
The cousin’s line. Twelve dollars.
She read Kaia’s line again.
She looked at the driver — the one she’d noted from a Grab ride weeks ago, the former teacher who drove four hours and stopped. Didn’t make sense to rebuild the same cage with different bars. The Thursday woman. The eleven-year woman.
She was still reaching.
Then she looked at Kaia’s line again —
what doesn’t transfer is not in the notes —
She went still.
The floor is the notes.
She thought of the man from the workshop. The piece he’d read — his father’s hands, the way he’d memorised them knuckle by knuckle without knowing he was memorising. He hadn’t written about what the hands had built. Just the hands.
The love was in the not-needing-to-look.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm.
Something in her went level — not open anymore. The broken cobblestone of the last three hours flattening out to concrete screed. The rev that had been there since the bus was no longer running without direction.
She picked up her pen.