Chapter Thirty-Three
The veranda had ceiling fans. Colin stood under one with a glass of water sweating in his hand and let the blades push the warm air across his face.
It wasn’t cool, but after two hours in a dining room with eight people and five conversations running at once in two languages, the quiet was worth braving the humidity for.
Behind him, through the open doors, the family was still at the table.
Rudolpho’s laugh carried through the house at a frequency that rattled the glassware, and underneath it, Mutya’s voice rose and fell in rapid Tagalog punctuated by her husband Jun’s dry interjections.
Diwa was in there somewhere, talking too fast, the way he always did when he had a captive audience in front of him.
Colin had eaten well. The cook, a tiny woman called Manang Celia who had taken one look at Colin’s plate and begun loading it with a second portion before he’d cleared the first, had produced a spread that made the crispy pata at Ledbury Road look like a warm-up act.
There had been sinigang so sour it made his eyes water, a whole lapu-lapu steamed with ginger and tomatoes, and a dish of pork belly in something dark and sweet that Lakan had ladled onto Colin’s rice with a generous hand while explaining, at length, that the recipe had been in the family for four generations.
He’d eaten all of it, because it was extraordinary, and because every time his plate showed a bare patch, someone filled it.
The garden below the veranda was lit by low lamps set into the pathway. Frangipani trees threw heavy shadows across the lawn, and something Colin couldn’t see was making a high, rhythmic sound in the hedgerow. An insect of some sort, maybe.
Colin heard her approach before he saw her, clocking the soft scuff of leather soles on tile, and the clink of a cup against a saucer. Maria Lucia came through the doors with a small coffee cup in her hand and stopped when she found the veranda occupied.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you were out here.”
“I’m just getting some air.” Colin lifted his glass to her. “That was a hell of a meal, and I needed to get on my feet.”
She smiled and settled into one of the rattan chairs near the railing, then rested her coffee cup onto the side table. “Diwa tells me you taught him to change a light bulb and have been taking the lead on the home improvements at Ledbury Road.”
“I have been.”
“That must take some patience.”
Colin smiled. “He’s getting there. I can leave him alone with the drill now and not come back to him bleeding.”
She laughed and her eyes creased at the corners the same way Diwa’s did. “You’ve done well. I tried to teach him how to cook rice when he was twelve, and he was completely useless. This was using a rice cooker, Colin!”
“He’s not bad now,” Colin said. “He does a decent garlic rice.”
She took a sip of her coffee and set it down. “When he was growing up, the most complicated thing he could manage was a bowl of cereal, and even that was touch and go. He spilled a lot of milk.”
“He’s a good man,” Colin said simply, because it seemed to him as though Maria Lucia needed to hear it.
Maria Lucia looked at him directly. “He is,” she agreed. “He makes poor decisions sometimes. Some very impactful ones. But yes, he’s a good man.”
“He’s a catch. But don’t let him know I said that to you.”
She laughed. “Your sons. Diwa’s told us about them. Stephen’s a barrister?”
“Junior corporate. He’s doing well.” Colin turned the glass in his hand. “His twin, Lysander, he’s finding his path.”
“Twins! That must have been hectic for you.”
“It was. But they turned out all right.”
“Better than all right, from what Diwa says.” She uncrossed her ankles and leaned back.
“He told me that your Stephen was quite thorough about vetting him, and I gather the first dinner with them didn’t go entirely smoothly.
He also described how your boy drove across London during peak traffic to take you to the doctor when you were unwell.
That kind of loyalty from a child says everything about the parent that you are. ”
“That’s just Stephen,” Colin said.
“A boy who does that learned that behaviour from you. You earned his loyalty.” Maria Lucia’s voice dropped.
“That’s years of your work paying off. The invisible kind of work that nobody writes about, because there’s no metric for it.
We give them everything. We spend years trying to show them what we can see.
And then they grow up and decide they’d rather not have been shown. ”
Colin bit down on his bottom lip. It wasn’t his place to comment on this.
He’d met this woman two hours ago, and the de la Vegas had been nothing but warm to him since he’d walked through the door.
He didn’t want trouble with the matriarch.
Especially not when he was only just getting used to the idea of wanting to be a part of it.
“You’re a smart woman,” he said. “You look at things as an academic. And because your son is so bloody smart himself, you thought he’d take it better if you put it in writing and laid it all out clearly for him.”
Maria Lucia pursed her perfectly made-up lips. “I was wrong,” she admitted.
They sat in the quiet following that statement. The fan turned. The low garden lamps threw their circles of light on the pathway, and somewhere beyond the wall, a motorbike accelerated down the road and faded into the distance.
“I imagine,” Maria Lucia said, “that you and I have quite a lot in common.”
Colin glanced at her.
“We’ve both spent years trying to do right by children who didn’t come with instructions.” The smile was back, wry this time, directed mostly at herself. “Though I suspect you’ve been rather better at it than I have.”
The veranda door banged open behind them.
Diwa came through, his gaze finding his mother first, then Colin. His shoulders drew up the way they did when he was about to go on the offensive.
“What are you two talking about?”
“Garlic rice,” Maria Lucia said, lifting her cup to her lips. “He says you make acceptable garlic rice now.”
“Mama.” Diwa crossed the veranda in three strides and positioned himself beside Colin’s chair, his hand finding Colin’s shoulder, thumb pressing into the muscle above his collarbone. “He’s had a long flight. He doesn’t need to be interviewed by you.”
Maria Lucia looked at her son over the rim of her coffee. Her expression didn’t change. “We were having a conversation, Diwa. I wanted to get to know him better. Isn’t this what you brought him here for?”
“Right.” Diwa’s hand hadn’t moved from Colin’s shoulder. “And then what, Mama? Would you have written me up a peer-reviewed critical analysis of your assessment of Colin? Fourteen pages, double-spaced, with citations?”
“Diwa —” Maria Lucia raised her hands palm up in a staying gesture.
“I don’t care what you think about him, Mama.
” His voice cracked on the word, and he didn’t seem to notice.
“He’s fucking amazing. He tells me when I’m being an asshole, for my own sake, not just to score points against me.
Then he puts the kettle on and doesn’t let me feel bad about it for longer than I have to.
Fuck, ma, he makes me laugh harder than anyone I’ve ever met.
” Diwa’s hand was trembling on Colin’s shoulder.
“He’s the best person I know. And if you can’t see that, then that’s your problem. ”
Maria Lucia’s hands came down. She looked at her son for a long moment, and then she smiled, her eyes bright in the low light. She reached up and laid her palm against Diwa’s cheek.
“Good,” she said. “It’s good that you feel that way about him, Diwa. And just for the record, I like what I’ve seen of him so far. We all do.”
Diwa’s mouth was still open from the next defensive sentence he’d been building. The fight went out of his shoulders, his hand loosening on Colin’s collarbone.
Colin leaned in against Diwa. “Come with me,” he said.
Diwa’s mouth opened around a protest.
“Now, please.” Colin held his gaze until Diwa drew closer to him, then turned to Maria Lucia. “Excuse us, please.”
She inclined her head and watched them as they walked away.
Colin guided Diwa down the veranda steps and into the garden, his hand still flat against Diwa’s upper back, walking him along the lit pathway between the trees until the veranda was twenty feet behind them and the sounds from the dining room faded.
He stopped. The warm night air pressed against both of them, thick with the scent of greenery. “She was being nice to me, Diwa.”
Diwa’s jaw worked. “You don’t know her, Colin. You don’t know what she’s —”
“I know what kindness looks like.” Colin kept his voice level. “I’ve lived through years of a lot of people I brush against not being very kind to me. I know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t like that she cornered you!”
“She didn’t though. She walked out onto the veranda, and found me,” Colin said.
“We were just having a chat. She was telling me about how you couldn’t even work a rice cooker back when you were twelve.
She’s just a mum having a chat with her child’s partner, Diwa.
Just sharing cute kid stories about you, not putting me through a bloody interrogation. ”
Colin’s thumb traced across Diwa’s sternum.
“The problem isn’t your mum, love. The problem is that you’ve got a fight loaded up, and you’ve been carrying it around since before we got on the plane.
Your mum’s not done anything wrong tonight.
Not to me. If you’ve got something to say to her about the essay, or what’s been going on with your company, then you need to talk to her properly, and not use me as an excuse to go off on her. ”
“I just —” He stopped. His hand came up and covered Colin’s where it rested on his chest. “She thinks I’m a failure, Colin.”
“No she doesn’t.”
“She wrote an essay about why everything I built is a blot on the face of humanity.”
“She wrote an essay about your company and corporate arrangements like yours,” Colin corrected. “The article wasn’t specifically about you. She told me that herself, ten minutes ago, before you came through that door.”
Diwa’s jaw tightened. “It doesn’t matter. The board gutted the remediation. The workers got fifty grand each and a gagging clause. And I can’t do a fucking thing about it because I don’t have a seat anymore, Colin. I can’t fix it.”
Colin frowned. “Who says you can’t do anything?”
“I just told you. They voted me out. I’ve got no vote, no voice, no further say in anything related to Orthos Analytics.”
“You’ve got two billion fucking dollars, Diwa.
” Colin’s hand stayed flat on his chest, his voice level.
“Two billion. You could ring every one of those workers yourself and pay them what they’re actually owed, out of your own pocket, and you’d still have more money than God and go on first-class flights every day for the rest of your life. Who says you can’t do anything?”
Diwa stared at him.
“You don’t need a board seat to do the right thing. You just need to stop feeling sorry for yourself long enough to pick up the phone.”
Diwa blinked at him. He went still, but Colin could see that the whirring of his mind had started, through the way his gaze went unfocused as he teased out a plan.
Colin kissed him and took his hand. “Let’s head home. We’re both tired, and you need time to think about this, don’t you, Diwa?”
Diwa nodded. Colin picked a frangipani flower off the nearest branch as they passed, turned it over in his fingers, and tucked it behind Diwa’s ear. Diwa’s hand came up to touch it, and Colin caught his wrist and lowered it.
“Leave it,” Colin said, and walked his stunned alpha back inside.