Epilogue
“It’s not my fault I gained weight,” Allan said, arms out at his sides while Manang Fely, the barangay’s one and only formal-wear seamstress, muttered around a mouthful of pins.
“I never said it was your fault,” she said. “I just said, hold still, so you don’t get stabbed.”
“That’s a threat.”
“Just a fact,” she said serenely, and kept pinning.
Robby, already fitted and clearly enjoying Allan’s suffering from the safety of the couch, sipped his coffee with maximum smugness.
“You’re so quiet,” Allan remarked. “Suspicious.”
“I’m done,” Robby said. “First timer’s privilege, first time getting fitted, no drama.”
“I hate that you’re aging like fine wine while I’m apparently aging like bread.”
“Bread’s good either way,” Robby said. “Just depends on the timing.”
“That made no sense.”
“I know,” Robby said, entirely unbothered, and went back to sipping his coffee like the matter was already settled.
Cora swept through mid-argument, inspecting both barongs with the exacting eye of a former principal grading a thesis defense, adjusted Allan’s collar without asking permission, and declared, “That’s enough. It looks good. Go eat before you both faint in here.”
“Ma, my question is,” Allan said, once the pins were finally out and he could breathe properly again, “where am I sitting at the wedding? Am I part of the entourage or—”
“You’re a groomsman, ‘di ba nga,” Cora said. “So you’re with Robby, the best man. You’ll stand together at the altar, and at the reception, you’ll be seated together at the head table too.”
“That seems oddly convenient.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cora said, unconvincingly, and left the room before he could press further.
By the time Ver and Anna’s wedding day rolled around, the sky couldn’t make up its mind again.
Allan stood on the church steps and watched clouds hustle past each other like titas racing for the last plastic chair, hurried but not quite panicked yet. The sun kept shouldering its way through for a few minutes at a time before another gray curtain shoved it aside.
“Very on-brand,” he murmured. “Wedding of the year, with a side of low-pressure area.”
“That’s enough postponement,” Robby said beside him, checking his phone for the latest PAGASA update. “Just Signal No. 1. Drama for the photos, a little drama for the roof. But nothing more.”
The church flower arrangements looked like someone had stolen half a garden. The aisle was lined with white petals. Electric fans stood at discreet intervals like merciful angels. The air was thick, part humidity, part communal kilig.
In the middle of it all, prancing with wholly undeserved self-importance, was Oryo, wearing a floral collar and a tiny pillow strapped to his back, the rings secured to it with ribbon.
“Ring bearer,” Jake declared, fussing with the ribbon one last time. “Dog of honor. If he pees on the aisle, I don’t know him.”
“Ang gayon mo ngunyan, Cora!” Tita Yolanda called out, loud enough to carry over the choir’s warm-up, and did not wait for a response before turning back to fuss with her own hem.
Cora, in a simple, regal terno that fully earned the compliment, bustled around making sure no one fainted, tripped, or stole the suman from the catering table.
She paused by Robby, who was crouched near the side aisle taping down projector cables, Jake’s insistence for the slideshow later, and straightened his collar like she had every right to.
“Robby, you okay?”
“I’m not the groom, Tita,” Robby laughed.
“You’re family,” she said. “In this barangay, that’s the same thing.”
The words landed in Allan’s chest like a quiet bell. A few months ago, he’d have heard them as pressure: one more expectation he had to live up to. Now they just sounded like what they were: an invitation to stay, already extended, already accepted.
Inside, the choir launched into a warm-up that sounded suspiciously like an OPM power ballad. Outside, a thin drizzle started, pattering the church roof like impatient fingers.
“Rain during the wedding,” Jake said, appearing with a fan in one hand and a small bottle of oil in the other, ever prepared for either weather or ghosts. “Blessing, or foreshadowing. Depends on your genre.”
“We’re going with blessing,” Allan said firmly. “We’ve hit our foreshadowing quota.”
The ceremony was a peak small-town Catholic spectacle, with long readings, a longer homily, and choir harmonies that occasionally wandered into their own private key. The priest managed to work “resilience,” “commitment,” and a reminder about the parish clean-up drive into the same sentence.
When it was time for the rings, a murmur went through the congregation.
Oryo took his job seriously, up to a point, trotting down the aisle with perfect poise until he spotted a dropped fishball near the third pew, paused, considered his higher calling, and delicately ate it before continuing.
Laughter rippled through the church. Even the priest chuckled.
Ver and Anna exchanged vows with shaking hands and wide, unguarded smiles.
“In good weather and bad,” Anna said, voice catching. “When the roof holds strong, and when the water rises. I promise, I will stay.”
“Through storms and through the days that don’t matter at all,” Ver replied, “when there’s no drama and when there’s too much. I promise, I will stay.”
Allan’s eyes stung. He caught Robby’s gaze: the tiny, knowing curve of his mouth said he’d heard the echo too.
After the kiss, cheered on more loudly than strictly necessary by the BEBES, the priest, clearly carried by the mood, added, “Even the dog agrees. That’s a good sign.”
By the time everyone spilled out of the church, the drizzle had thickened into a steady, gentle rain, the kind that made everything shine without threatening to uproot anything.
“Perfect,” Jake said, already snapping photos. “Soft light, symbolic weather, no tents flying away. This is my cinematography era.”
At the reception in the plaza, under a ceiling of fairy lights, the BEBES held court at a central table, evaluating everything from the lechon’s crispiness to the bridesmaids’ eyeshadow with the ruthless authority of a tribunal.
“Ten out of ten,” one announced, biting into a piece of lechon skin. “Crispy, not too oily.”
“Hair and makeup, eight,” another said. “Minus two for the eyeliner, it went all the way to the eyebrow.”
Music thumped. Kids ran wild between tables.
On a side table, a stack of small printed booklets sat beside a hand-lettered sign, Paano Sumayaw ang Bagyo?
, the kids’ storm drawings from San Andres and Manila collected and bound together, funded, in the end, by the same grant Robby had once used to guilt Allan into picking up a paintbrush again.
Allan’s heart did a small, stupid flip seeing his own messy doodles turned into something a stranger’s kid might actually hold onto.
Then it was time for Robby’s toast.
“I’ve known Ver since we were kids,” Robby began, “and I’ve known his whole family too, including a sibling I loved for a long time and was scared of, both, but that’s a story for another time.
” He paused for the laughter, waiting it out with practiced patience.
“The truth is, the Reyes family didn’t just feed me every day when I was a kid.
They also taught me what real staying looks like.
From Tita Cora, I learned that love doesn’t need to be big to be real.
From Ver, I learned how to stand loyally beside someone, even through chaos.
And from—” he glanced, deliberately, at Allan “—from Allan, I learned, late, that love doesn’t have to be right the first time, as long as it’s right in the end. ”
Ver, true to prediction, was already openly crying by the second sentence. Anna wasn’t far behind.
“To Ver and Anna,” Robby finished, raising his glass, “may your home always have food, always have laughter, and always have enough patience for each other, the same patience you taught me, even without realizing it.”
The whole plaza raised their glasses, and Allan, watching Robby sit back down beside him, understood, not for the first time that week, but maybe most clearly in that exact moment, that everything he’d once been afraid to trust about this man had, in the end, turned out to be completely, unglamorously true.
Later, on the wet dance floor, the covered court’s center cleared and draped in white fabric and questionable fairy lights, the newlywed couple’s first dance bled into a second, then a third. Eventually someone shouted, “Sayawan na!” and the emcee happily echoed it.
Allan stayed seated. He could feel Cora’s gaze on his back. He could feel the BEBES vibrating with barely contained commentary. He could feel ten years of imagined scenes pressing up behind his ribs, all the old versions of himself who would have found a reason to leave the room right about now.
Then Robby stood and held out a hand.
“Want to give them something to talk about?” he asked, mouth tilted in a half-smile.
“They already have plenty to talk about,” Allan said. “But, sure.”
They stepped onto the dance floor.
The song was something slow and unapologetically mushy, one of those ballads that had played at every Filipino wedding, familiar enough that Allan’s body knew the sway without thinking about it. His hands found Robby’s shoulders; Robby’s palms settled lightly at his waist.
Around them, other couples swayed: Ver and Anna, glowing and clinging; a cluster of titas with their resigned husbands; and two teenagers who very obviously thought they were being subtle.
Across the court, Cora stood near the stage, arms folded, watching.
She did not interfere. She did not look away.
If anything, she straightened her shoulders a little, like she’d decided this, too, was part of her jurisdiction to protect.
“High school me would have been scared, would’ve hidden in the bathroom rather than do this,” Robby murmured.
“High school you was a coward,” Allan said.
“True,” Robby said. “I like this version better.”
“Me too,” Allan said.
They swayed in their own small orbit, the rest of the world blurring into light and music and the occasional bark from Oryo, patrolling the edge of the dance floor like a small, furry security detail.
“Have you ever thought,” Robby asked, voice low enough to get lost under the music for anyone else, “about how we should have figured this out sooner?”
“Yeah,” Allan said honestly. “But, also no. We might have just ruined it. We were too busy back then, trying to be acceptable to everyone else.”
“Now, it’s just our own mess,” Robby said.
“Our own storm,” Allan corrected. “Still learning the choreography.”
They both laughed, quiet, a little closer without quite meaning to be.
“You know,” Robby went on after a moment, “in disaster work, they always train us to think worst-case—what if everything falls apart at once? But with you, I’m learning to think best case too.
Sometimes the wind blows the right direction, not to build a huge storm, but to show you something good waiting after it. ”
Allan’s throat tightened. “Corny,” he said, the word coming out rough.
“I know,” Robby said. “Still true.”
They laughed again, helpless, and Allan let his head rest onto Robby’s shoulder, feeling the solid, warm weight of him there, no longer immediately counting the minutes until he’d have to let go.
He would still fly sometimes. Manila would still call, occasionally, for smaller, less complicated reasons now. Storms would come and go, just like they always had, the way they always would. The island would stay and change and demand things of him and hold him anyway.
But right now, on this dance floor, in this light rain, with Ver laughing somewhere behind them and Cora’s silhouette steady by the stage and Oryo trotting his self-important little patrol, Allan was exactly where he wanted to be.
THE END