We stopped for coffee on the way back. Mia's idea, obviously, she had always been the kind of person who treated a journey as an excuse rather than an inconvenience, and twenty minutes into the drive, she had spotted a place with outdoor seating and made a sound that left me no real choice in the matter.
Now we were at a small table on the pavement, coffees between us, the city doing its afternoon thing around us, and Mia was doing what Mia always does, talking about everything and nothing in a way that felt relaxed but somehow always ended up exactly where she intended.
"So how's work?" she asked, stirring her drink slowly.
"Good," I said. "Really good, actually. We landed a new client last month, a big commercial development project. A lot of moving parts, but it's the kind of thing I've been wanting to get my hands on for a while."
She nodded, genuinely interested. "Commercial development. That's a step up."
"A few steps up," I admitted.
"Look at you." She said it warmly, without a trace of irony. "You always said you wanted to work on something with real scale."
"I did."
"Arthur says the same thing, actually." She said it lightly, conversationally, as if it were an afterthought, as she'd just happened to remember. "That the most interesting work is always the work with the most variables. The stuff that pushes back."
I wrapped both hands around my cup. "Does he?"
"Mm." She took a sip. Gazed out at the street. "He'd probably find your project interesting."
"Probably lots of people would find it interesting," I said pleasantly. "It's a good project."
The corner of her mouth moved. Just slightly.
"True," she agreed.
Silence. Comfortable enough, but with something sitting in it.
"He asked about you, you know," she said then, still looking at the street.
I kept my expression completely still. "Did he?"
"When I told him I was coming to visit." She turned back to me now, chin resting lightly on her hand, eyes easy and open and giving absolutely nothing away. "He said, and I'm quoting, tell Ava I said hello."
"That's a very normal thing to say," I said.
"It is," she agreed.
"People say that all the time."
"They do."
"It's just a polite it's just manners."
"Completely," Mia said, nodding seriously, her expression the picture of innocence. "Very standard. Very brotherly-friend-of-the-family sort of thing to say."
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
"Mia."
"Ava."
"Don't."
She blinked. Wide-eyed. Wounded, almost. "I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing something."
"I'm drinking my coffee," she said, lifting her cup as evidence. "I'm sitting here, enjoying the afternoon, making perfectly normal conversation with my best friend, who I haven't seen in a year.
"You said his name four times in the last ten minutes."
She considered this. "Did I? I hadn't noticed."
I gave her a long, flat look.
She gave me back a smile so serene it was practically a provocation.
"He's moving here, Ava," she said, gentler now, like she was simply stating a fact and leaving it there for me to do whatever I wanted with. "That's all I'm saying. It's just something. Don't you think it's something?"
"I think it's a business decision," I said. "For a company with offices in four countries."
"Five, actually. He just confirmed Sydney."
"Five countries," I said evenly. "It has nothing to do with
"With?" she prompted softly.
I stopped.
She waited.
"With anything," I finished.
Mia looked at me for a moment with that particular expression she had, not quite a smile, not quite something else. The one that felt like she was holding something carefully, deciding whether to put it down or keep it close.
Then she sat back in her chair and tilted her face up toward the afternoon sun, perfectly relaxed.
"You know what I've always loved about you?" she said.
"I'm sure you'll tell me."
"You are so consistent." She said it fondly. Admiringly, almost. "Honestly. It's a real quality."
I picked up my coffee.
"I hate you a little bit," I told her.
"No, you don't," she said, eyes still closed, smiling at the sun. "You're really glad I'm back."
The terrible thing was that she was right.
The first week with Mia was, in a word, chaos.
Wonderful, loud, completely exhausting chaos.
She had taken over my apartment the way she took over everything gradually and then all at once, until suddenly there were throw blankets on every surface that weren't mine, a collection of her skincare products that had quietly colonized my entire bathroom counter, and a playlist she had titled "Mia's Takeover Era" running on my speaker at a volume I would never have chosen for a Tuesday morning.
I didn't mind. Not even a little.
I had forgotten what it felt like to have someone in my space. Really, in it, not as a guest who moved carefully around your things, but as a person who simply existed alongside you, loudly and unapologetically, in the way only your oldest friend could. Coffee was made for two every morning without discussion. Takeout boxes accumulated on the kitchen counter because neither of us could agree on a cuisine, and we always ended up ordering from two places. Conversations started in the kitchen, migrated to the couch, and somehow ended up continuing through the bathroom door at eleven at night because neither of us had learned how to stop talking.
It was exactly what I hadn't realized I needed
By the second week, we had established what Mia solemnly declared was a schedule, which was really just a loose collection of things we wanted to do that we kept rearranging every morning over coffee.
We went to the farmers market on Saturday and came home with far too many things: a jar of honey we definitely didn't need, bread that was still warm, flowers Mia insisted on arranging herself, even though she had no idea what she was doing; the result looked, charitably, abstract. She put them on my windowsill anyway and declared them perfect.
We tried a new restaurant every few days. Mia had done her research with the dedication of someone planning a military operation. She had a running list saved on her phone, organized by cuisine and cross-referenced with reviews, and she consulted it with the seriousness of a general studying a map. The Thai place on the corner that I had walked past a hundred times and never entered turned out to be extraordinary. The much-hyped brunch spot she had bookmarked from a travel blog turned out to be deeply average, and we spent twenty minutes dissecting why over mediocre eggs Benedict before agreeing it had still been worth going to have an opinion.
We took long walks in the evenings when the heat softened, and the city felt easier to move through, sometimes talking the entire time, sometimes comfortable enough in the silence that we'd go twenty minutes without saying anything, and it never felt strange. We discovered a bookshop three streets from my apartment that I was genuinely embarrassed I hadn't found before, tucked behind a flower stall, with a handwritten sign in the window and a cat asleep in the display. Mia bought four books. I bought two. We both knew we probably wouldn't finish all of them, but that had never been the point.
We stayed up too late most nights. There was always one more thing to talk about, one more episode of something to watch, one more glass of wine to justify before finally admitting it was well past midnight and neither of us was showing any real signs of stopping.
I laughed more in those two weeks than I had in months. Real laughter, the kind that came from somewhere unguarded, that caught you off guard and left your cheeks aching afterward. Mia had always had that effect on me. She found the absurdity in everything.
And then, somewhere around the start of the third week, Arthur started to appear.
Not in person. Not yet.
But everywhere else.
It started small. A notification on my phone from a business news app I followed loosely, one of those alerts I usually swiped away without reading. But this one I didn't swipe away.
VOSS REAL ESTATE GROUP CONFIRMS EXPANSION INTO [CITY]: CEO ARTHUR VOSS SET TO LEAD DEVELOPMENT OF LANDMARK MIXED-USE PRECINCT.
I read it twice. Then I put my phone face down on the kitchen counter and went to refill my coffee.
By the afternoon, it wasn't small anymore.
The story had been picked up by every major outlet in the city's business press, lifestyle publications, architecture blogs, and local news. The notification stack on my phone looked almost comical. By evening, it had spread to national financial media, and somewhere around nine o'clock, Mia dropped onto the couch beside me, held her phone screen in front of my face without a word, and let me read.
It was a profile piece. Long form, glossy, the kind of journalism that required access. The headline read: The Man Who Buys Skylines: Arthur Voss Is Coming For Your City, And He's Not In A Hurry.
There was a photograph. Of course, there was a photograph.
He was standing in front of the Singapore waterfront precinct, in a dark suit, no tie, looking at something just off-camera with an expression that was focused and completely, irritatingly composed. He looked exactly like someone who had decided to acquire a city and found the whole business fairly straightforward.
"Good photo," Mia said simply.
"It's fine," I said.
She said nothing. Which was somehow worse.
By midweek, the city had developed what could only be described as a full collective obsession.
The business forums were dissecting his acquisition strategy, debating which parcels of land he had already secured through shell companies, mapping out projected development corridors with the fervor of people who had suddenly realized the game had changed and were scrambling to catch up. Commercial real estate agents were, reportedly, having the best week of their professional lives. Several had already made statements to the press about increased market confidence. One had called Arthur Voss's interest in the city "a generational event for property development."
The architecture community had opinions, naturally. An editorial in a design publication I followed mostly for work, sometimes for pleasure, ran a two-page spread asking what his arrival would mean for the city's existing architectural identity. It was thoughtful and measured and slightly nervous, the way all the best architectural criticism was. Someone in the comments wrote that he's going to build something extraordinary, and you all know it, and left it at that.
Social media was, predictably, something else entirely.
Mia read me excerpts over breakfast with the delight of a person who had a deeply personal connection to the subject matter and found the public's reaction enormously entertaining.
"Listen to this one," she said, barely suppressing a grin. "Arthur Voss buying up land in our city is genuinely the most romantic thing that's happened here in years. The man is committed."
"That's not what romantic means," I said.
"This one's better." She scrolled. "Finding out Arthur Voss is moving to the city is making me want to become a real estate developer. Or at minimum, own property. Or at minimum, walk past whatever building he's going to construct."
"That's unhinged."
"This one." She turned her phone to show me the post, unable to keep a straight face. Someone had put a photograph of the city's existing skyline side by side with a rendering they apparently mocked up of what a Voss development might add to it, with the caption: "before and after Arthur Voss decides your city is worth his time." It had thousands of likes.
I looked at it for a moment longer than I intended to.
"The internet is very invested," I said, setting my coffee down.
"The internet is always very invested," Mia said, locking her phone with tremendous satisfaction. "But in this case, I think they're onto something."
She was doing the look again. The knowing one. I ignored it with great discipline.
But it was the local evening news segment that really crystallized how thoroughly Arthur Voss had already arrived even before arriving.
I had the television on in the background while I was making dinner when I caught it. A segment on the city's economic outlook, which pivoted, fairly quickly, to what one anchor described as "the most significant private investment announcement this city has seen in over a decade."
There was a brief clip of archival footage from a red carpet event in London, and Arthur was in it for maybe four seconds, shaking hands with someone and then turning briefly toward the camera with the same focused, unhurried composure from the magazine photo. Four seconds. The news ticker across the bottom of the screen read: VOSS REAL ESTATE GROUP: CITY CONFIRMS DISCUSSIONS WITH PLANNING DEPARTMENT ALREADY UNDERWAY.
He hadn't even landed yet, and he was already in discussions with the planning department.
Of course he was.
I turned back to the stove.
From the couch, Mia called out, "Did you see that bit?"
"I saw it."
A beat.
"He looks well," she offered.
"Mm."
Another beat.
"Ava."
"Don't," I said.
She laughed not unkindly and went back to her book.
Later that night, after dinner, we were curled at opposite ends of the couch in the comfortable, easy way we had fallen into over the past two weeks, Mia with her book, me with mine, the lamp throwing a warm circle of light over the room. The city is doing its quiet nighttime hum outside the window.
"Three weeks," Mia said eventually, not looking up from her page.
"What?"
"That's what I said at the airport. Three weeks, give or take." She turned a page. "It's been two."
I kept my eyes on my book. "I know."
"So approximately one week, give or take." She paused, with the precision of someone placing a chess piece. "Before he gets here."
The apartment was very quiet for a moment.
"Okay," I said.
Mia turned another page.
"Okay," she agreed pleasantly, and said nothing else.
Outside, the city stretched on, lit and restless and completely unaware that somewhere across an ocean, a man was about to land in it and change the shape of everything.
Including, I was beginning to suspect.