SHORT STORIES

Interim Valuation

Synopsis

On the final day of December in Kota Kinabalu, property sales executive Ken is assigned to assist Josephine Tan, a professional land valuer from Kuala Lumpur, who has flown in to assess a valuable coastal plot in Tanjung Aru. What begins as a strictly professional arrangement slowly evolves into something far more intimate over the course of a single unforgettable night.
As Ken guides Josephine through the city's property landscape from seaside eateries to emerging developments and sunset waterfronts their formal client relationship softens into genuine connection. Intelligent conversations, shared humor, and quiet emotional honesty reveal two people carrying loneliness beneath polished careers.

After a seafood dinner and late night drinks on New Year's Eve, neither wants the night to end. Back at Josephine's hotel, the emotional tension they've built throughout the day finally breaks. In the privacy of Room 1224, their connection deepens into passion, tenderness, vulnerability, and temporary escape from the realities waiting outside the hotel walls.

Throughout the night, they move beyond flirtation into something emotionally raw: two strangers finding comfort, desire, and understanding in each other during the brief space between one year ending and another beginning. Yet beneath the intimacy lies an unspoken truth this was never meant to last forever.

By dawn, the world begins calling them back. Josephine has a flight home. Ken has a life waiting in Kota Kinabalu. With no promises and no certainty about tomorrow, they part knowing that what they shared may have only lasted one night but it became a memory neither of them would ever forget.
Interim Valuation is a romantic drama about timing, temporary connections, emotional longing, and the strange way two people can briefly become home to each other before life pulls them apart again.