Chapter 18
Allan had taken to answering emails on his phone behind the cinema’s crumbling ticket booth, where nobody would see the calendar invites stacking up, a “culture fit conversation,” a “compensation walkthrough,” each one scheduled with the brisk, efficient cheer of a company that had apparently decided its earlier mistake was worth correcting generously.
He hadn’t told anyone. Not Ver, not Cora, not Jake, and, the fact sitting worse in his stomach every day, not Robby.
It was Robby who finally cornered the truth, and there was no grand confrontation in it at all, just the small, mundane accumulation of things Allan had gotten sloppy about hiding.
Allan closed the screen too fast. “Job interview,” he said. “Nothing’s certain yet, so—”
“Interview for what, where?”
Something in the measured, neutral way Robby asked it told Allan he already suspected the answer.
“My old company,” Allan admitted finally, quiet. “In Manila.”
The table, just the two of them, Cora and Ver both out finalizing wedding logistics, went very still.
“When did you apply?” Robby asked.
“I didn’t apply. They…they were the ones who reached out. Director role. Big. Bigger than before.”
“When?”
Allan made himself hold his gaze. “Two weeks now.”
Robby set down his fork slowly, the kind of careful that meant he was working hard to keep his voice level. “Two weeks.” He exhaled, recalibrating before the sentence could turn into an accusation. “Two weeks that we’ve been—” He stopped himself and started over. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want to think about any of it until I’d actually figured myself out,” Allan said, defensive now, the old instinct to armor up kicking in exactly on schedule. “I didn’t want to make it into a huge thing before I even knew what I was going to do.”
“This already is a huge thing,” Robby said. “Your job in Manila. Your life here. Us. It’s already huge, Allan, you’re…hiding it.
“And it’s bigger than us,” Robby went on before Allan could answer.
“The site visit is one week out now, not three. They moved it up again. If you leave mid-project, Kapitan loses the funding slot. That’s not my project on the line anymore, Allan.
It’s the evacuation building. Real people’s storm shelter.
You didn’t just sign up for a relationship when you picked up that paintbrush. You signed up for a deadline.”
“I’m not hiding it—”
“Yes, you are,” Robby said, and for the first time since the library, real hurt broke through the careful patience he’d been practicing.
“You know this is exactly how it happened before? You and I don’t say what we’re actually both feeling, and then suddenly you’re just gone.
That’s what happened in high school. And now—”
“Remember what I told you a few days ago?” Robby said, voice unsteady. “I said I didn’t know if I could survive you vanishing again. I wasn’t being poetic, Allan. I meant it as a warning to myself, and apparently, I need one.”
“That’s not fair,” Allan said, sharper than he meant to. “I’m not 18, running away because I’m scared. This is an actual career decision—”
“Not scared? I’m not saying you’re a kid. I’m saying I know what your face looks like when you’re scared, and that’s the face you’ve got right now.”
Allan opened his mouth to argue and found, humiliatingly, that he didn’t have a rebuttal ready because Robby was right, and some old, stubborn part of him hated exactly how right he was.
“I need to think about myself too,” Allan said instead, quieter, less certain. “It’s not all about you, about us. I have a whole life I put on hold for a long time, a dream I set aside to come back here.”
“I’m not saying you can’t think about yourself,” Robby said, and his voice cracked slightly, the anger draining into something more honest and more frightened.
“Two systems. Remember? You can’t tell yet if they drift apart, or turn into one thing.
” He exhaled, and for a second didn’t say anything else at all.
“I can wait for you. But if you disappear without a word again, I just don’t know if I can take that. ”
The word landed hard between them: Again. The same shape of the old wound, threatening to close over the same old scar.
“But I’m not leaving,” Allan said, though even he could hear how it sounded less like a promise and more like a wish.
“You don’t know that,” Robby said, standing, gathering the dinner plates with hands that weren’t quite steady. “Because you don’t even know what you’re going to do. You said so yourself.”
He left the room before Allan could find an answer, and Allan sat alone at the table for a long time afterward, staring at his phone, at Thu 2PM sitting there in stubborn, glowing black text, feeling, for the first time in weeks, exactly as lost as he had the day he’d stepped off that ferry.
Oryo padded in eventually and rested his chin on Allan’s knee, unimpressed by the whole situation, the way dogs generally were about human drama.
“I know,” Allan told him. “I know.”
He didn’t sleep much that night. Somewhere past midnight, he gave up completely, sat at his desk, and pulled out the sketchbook, flipping back through weeks of drawings without quite meaning to, the anvil clouds from the ridge, the mural sketches, a quick, unfinished study of Robby laughing at something off-page, drawn from memory because Allan hadn’t been brave enough yet to ask him to sit still for it properly.
He found, near the back, an old page from his very first week home: a rough, half-abandoned sketch of the ferry, the rooster, the woman in her faded campaign shirt. Underneath it, scrawled fast in pencil, a note he didn’t remember writing: Home is not a prize you win by being successful.
He stared at that line for a long time.
He was doing it again, he realized, avoiding a version of himself, except this time it wasn’t the boy with the paintbrush he was running from. It was the boy who still, after everything, needed a number and a title to feel like he’d earned his own life.
He didn’t have an answer yet for what to do about the email. But he had, finally, the right question, and it kept him up considerably longer than the wrong ones ever had.
He didn’t know yet, not really. But he was starting, slowly and painfully, to suspect he already did.