MasukI sat in front of the booking page longer than the decision itself required, checking the dates once, then the arrival time, then the return flight, everything matching the four-day window I'd already cleared. My cursor hovered over the purchase button, not because I doubted Damien, but because the action itself was about to make the whole thing real in a way that talking about it hadn't. There was a difference between making room for four days on a calendar and buying a ticket that would actually carry me to my husband.I bought it.The confirmation landed in my inbox a moment later, my name, the dates, departure and return, and I read it twice before I let myself smile properly. I noticed, with a small quiet satisfaction, that I'd booked a return ticket too. I was going to Damien. I was also coming back, to the programme and the life I'd built here, and both of those things could be true at once without canceling each other out.I sent him the confirmation with no message attached,
A message arrived from Damien that afternoon with a subject line that read Possible Singapore options. Not an itinerary. I opened it and found exactly that, a restaurant, a waterfront walk, one museum, a dinner reservation idea, tentative time blocks, all laid out with a precision that made me call him immediately. "This is an itinerary," I told him. "It is a list," he said. "It has times." "Tentative times." "You have color-coded a marriage."I asked how long it had taken him to make it. "That is not relevant," he said. "Twenty minutes?" Silence. "Damien." "Eleven," he finally admitted, and I laughed hard enough that I had to sit down."I don't want four days of being escorted around Singapore by Chairman Black," I told him. "That sounds efficient," he said. "I want my husband," I said, and that quieted him. I explained what I actually meant. I wanted his apartment, not a hotel. His ordinary breakfast, whatever terrible coffee he'd finally settled on. The chair he actually sat in whe
I woke with his words still sitting there, plain and unavoidable. Come to Singapore. Wanting to go did not mean I had to leave tomorrow. It meant I could finally look at the question honestly, so before I did anything else, I reached for my calendar instead of my phone.The next two weeks were dense, implementation work that genuinely needed me, a participant review I wasn't ready to hand off yet. But farther out, past the worst of it, there was a stretch that looked almost deliberately empty. Four days. I studied it for a while, checking what sat underneath it, asking myself honestly whether anything there actually required me specifically or just happened to have my name attached out of habit.Later that morning, a staff member brought me a routine sign-off, the kind of decision I usually made without thinking twice. I nearly took it automatically, then stopped myself. "What do you think?" I asked instead. She gave a sensible answer, better than what I'd have rushed through myself,
Damien had just said so do I, and the silence that followed wasn't awkward, exactly, just charged in a way that made me suddenly notice how close his face looked on the screen and how far away he actually was."This is a terrible design flaw," I said, mostly to break it."Marriage?""Video calls. You should be less attractive in low resolution.""I'll speak to Singapore about it," he said, and I laughed, grateful for the small reprieve."What do you miss?" he asked."You.""That was evasive."I thought about it properly then, and gave him something specific instead of a general answer. "Your hand on my waist." He went quiet enough that I noticed. "You asked," I reminded him. "I know," he said, low."Your terrible habit of taking up more than half the bed," I added, lighter, needing somewhere less intense to land."That has never happened.""Singapore has made you dishonest.""What do you miss?" I asked him back.He didn't say anything obvious. "You reaching for me before you're fully
Define behave.I stared at it for exactly as long as I needed to construct an appropriately innocent response. Start by buttoning your cuffs, I wrote. They are buttoned, he sent back, and I looked at the photograph again, which somehow made it worse. Stop sending photographs you know are distracting. That sounds subjective. It isn't.I had a real day ahead of me, implementation logistics to review, staff meetings, a schedule sign-off that couldn't wait, and I told myself firmly that I was going to concentrate. I had built an entire career around concentration. Apparently marriage had introduced an international threat to it.The photos kept arriving anyway. Coffee on his desk, his hand visible around the cup. His jacket over the back of his chair. Sleeves rolled higher than they'd been that morning. I am documenting my day, he claimed. Your forearms are not a required part of the documentation, I wrote back. That sounds discriminatory.I decided if he was going to play that game, I wa
I was halfway through a resource pathway meeting when someone appeared at the office entrance carrying flowers, a tasteful arrangement that had clearly cost more thought than money. I knew before anyone said his name. The card was painfully concise. Apparently love also costs international delivery fees. D."Your husband?" a staff member asked."Unfortunately.""That does not sound unfortunate," she said, glancing at the arrangement, and I tried to move on before someone noticed I was smiling. "You're smiling," someone else pointed out. "I'm working," I said. "Those things can apparently happen at the same time," she said, and I decided my own face had betrayed me entirely.I photographed the flowers and sent them to him. You are showing off. His reply came fast. Incorrect. There are witnesses, I wrote. That sounds like a programme governance issue. You sent flowers to my workplace. I'm aware. Why? Because I wanted to.I told him everyone now knew her husband missed her. Were they p







