Chapter 17
The email arrived on a Tuesday, while Allan was up on the scaffolding trying to get a cloud to look less like a cauliflower and more like an actual storm.
He almost didn’t see it. His phone had been buried in his paint bag for an hour, and by the time he checked it, there were three missed calls and a message that made his stomach drop in a way he hadn’t felt since the ferry.
Hi Allan! Hope you’re doing well. Leadership would like to discuss bringing you back in a senior capacity, Director, Regional Ops. Salary and title well above your previous role. Can we set up a call this week?
He read it four times, standing very still on the scaffolding, paintbrush dripping storm-gray onto his shoe.
Director. Regional Ops. The number attached to it, because of course there was a number attached to it, HR loved nothing more than leading with a number, was more than double what he’d made before, more than either of his parents had made in a year, ever, combined.
It was also, he did the math before he could stop himself, more than enough to cover Ma’s quarterly scans in Virac for the next five years without either of them thinking twice about the cost again.
“What was that?” Robby called up from below, sanding down a bench they’d salvaged from the old lobby. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Nothing,” Allan said, too fast, sliding the phone back into his bag. “Spam. Some insurance scam thing.”
He hated how easily the lie came out. Hated more how his hands were shaking slightly as he went back to the cloud, which now, undeniably, looked even more like a cauliflower than before.
He didn’t tell Robby that night. Or the night after that.
It wasn’t exactly a decision: more a kind of quiet, private math he found himself doing at odd hours, in the shower, halfway through dinner, lying awake with Oryo snoring against his feet.
Director. Regional Ops. The kind of title that would make every relative at Ver’s wedding nod approvingly instead of asking, gently, delicately, what exactly he was planning to do now that he was twenty-eight and unemployed and painting walls for free.
He told himself he was just thinking it over. That it would be irresponsible not to consider it. That nothing had actually changed.
But he found himself, that week, snapping at small things that had never bothered him before, the BEBES’ good-natured teasing suddenly grating instead of warm, the slow provincial pace of the cinema project suddenly feeling less like peace and more like standing still while the rest of the world kept moving without him.
“You okay?” Robby asked Wednesday, watching Allan repaint the same section of sky for the third time, each version somehow worse than the last.
“I’m fine,” Allan said, too sharp, and immediately hated himself for it. “Sorry. Just tired.”
Robby studied him a beat longer than the answer deserved, but let it go, just like he’d learned to over the past few weeks, giving Allan room instead of crowding him, trusting, apparently, that whatever this was would surface on its own time.
Allan almost told him twice that week. Both times, the words got as far as his mouth and stalled there, blocked by the same old instinct that had sent him running to Manila in the first place: better to handle this alone, quietly, and present Robby with a finished decision than to admit, out loud, that some small, stubborn part of him was actually tempted.
That was the part that scared him most. Not the offer itself.
The fact that some old, half-buried version of himself had heard Director, Regional Ops and felt, for one humiliating second, relieved, like proof, finally, that he hadn’t actually failed at the thing everyone had always expected of him.
That leaving San Andres the first time hadn’t been a waste.
That he could still, if he wanted, go back to being someone easy to explain at reunions.
He replied to Ms. Padilla on Thursday night, alone in his room, Oryo watching him with the specific suspicion dogs reserve for humans typing in the dark.
Thank you for reaching out. I’d like to discuss this further. Can we schedule something for next week?
He didn’t mention the mural. Didn’t mention Robby. Didn’t mention any of the ten thousand small, unglamorous, undeniable reasons he’d started, for the first time in a decade, to feel like a whole person again.
He hit send and felt, underneath the guilt, a small, treacherous flicker of the old adrenaline, that particular high of being wanted by something big and important and far away, the exact drug he’d spent a decade mistaking for purpose.
Outside his window, the mural sat half-finished on the cinema wall two streets over, two painted figures standing hand in hand under a storm neither of them was running from.
He didn’t go look at it that night. He told himself he was tired.
He knew, even as he told himself that, that it wasn’t true.
He almost told Cora on Friday. She caught him staring at his phone over breakfast, just like she caught everything, and asked, mild, “Something wrong?”—and the whole confession rose up in his throat, ready.
“Nothing,” he said instead. “Just work. I need to think it through carefully.”
She studied him a beat longer than the answer warranted, the old teacher’s instinct for a student holding something back, but let it go: the same grace she’d been extending him since coming home, trusting him to bring things to her on his own time.
He hated, a little, how easily he’d taken advantage of that grace to keep hiding.
That weekend, at the cinema, Jake caught him rereading the offer email for the fourth time, thumb hovering over Ms. Padilla’s number.
“Are you actually going to answer that?” Jake asked, glancing over his shoulder without much subtlety.
“It’s just an email, Jake.”
“You know, I spent four years selling ghost stories about the thing behind the chapel,” Jake said. “I know what it looks like when someone’s hiding something. You’re hiding something.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Everybody is,” Jake said, unfazed. “But Allan, I’ve known you since we were kids. My only question is who you’re actually going to tell before you even tell yourself what you’ve decided. Because if Robby isn’t the first person you tell, that already says something.”
Allan didn’t have an answer for that. Jake, mercifully, didn’t push for one, just clapped him once on the shoulder and went back to arguing with the engineer about ceiling joists again, leaving Allan alone with the phone, the email, and a certain, growing discomfort of being seen a little too clearly by someone who used to just tell ghost stories for a living.