The first month was easy, in the deceptive way that beginnings often are.

There was a rhythm to it almost immediately — his evening was her late afternoon, which gave them a reliable window: he'd call from his apartment balcony, looking out at Singapore's skyline doing its nightly impression of a circuit board, and she'd be winding down at the office or walking home through Koregaon Park's early dusk. Some days it was twenty minutes. Some days it was two hours, the kind of conversation that drifted from architecture to family to nothing at all, the comfortable nothing of two people who'd run out of things to report and simply wanted to remain in each other's company a little longer.