Nur.

There's a moment in the day when Nur's scales shine. It's at night, when the light from the street lamps in the void deck comes through the window on the eighth floor and falls across his arms. By that hour Nur should already be asleep, but he's been awake since eleven — watching the street from up there, still, with his knees tucked up on the windowsill. It's his hour. Malayan pangolins are strictly nocturnal. Real peak activity starts at midnight and runs until four in the morning. Singapore requires a six-year-old to get up at half past six for school. The result is a child who survives the mornings, who performs from ten onward, who sleeps the forty-five-minute nap like a rescue, and who at eleven at night is more awake than at any other hour.

Aminah knows this. Sometimes she hears him moving down the hallway toward the window. She doesn't stop him: she stays in bed and listens until he comes back. The void deck, that covered ground-floor space in HDB blocks where neighbors sit during the day, is empty at one in the morning. Sometimes Nur goes down. In Singapore, at that hour, a child alone in a void deck gets noticed. But the neighborhood is safe and Aminah trusts that her grandson at those hours is exactly who he is supposed to be.

Aminah keeps things of Nur's. The first pangolin drawing — done the day after that night in the park. A gold button that fell off the overalls and that Nur asked her not to throw away. A school note where Miss Chen wrote that Nur had put his hand up voluntarily in science class to talk about ants.

Nur also keeps things, but his go in a tin under the bed: stones, pieces of sea glass, a nut, a myna feather. Every object has its exact place. If someone moved that tin, something would break. Aminah never touches it.

They both keep things of each other. Aminah in drawers and on bedside tables. Nur in pockets and in the tin. It's not the kind of care that gets said — it's the kind that gets stored somewhere and looked at now and then. That usually does.