“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 yourcompanyand corporate arrangements like yours,” Colin corrected. “The article wasn’t specifically aboutyou. 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. “Twobillion. 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.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fivewhole lechons stretched across a row of banquette tables draped in white linen, their skins golden-brown and taut as drumskin, garlanded by an amount of tropical flowers that could only be described as aggressive. Orchids, sampaguita, hibiscus in hot pink and tangerine, heaped between the platters in drifts so thick that the tables beneath had ceased to exist as furniture and become, instead, some sort of floral altar to roast pork. Somebody had woven jasmine through the serving spoons.
Colin stood in front of the centrepiece pig and did not move.
He’d felt like this twice before in his life. Once at the Tagaytay viewpoint, when Lakan had driven them up for a day trip and Colin had looked out across the lake at Taal Volcano rising from the water and really understood, for the first time, that the earth was alive underneath him. Once in the Mall of Asia, standing on the ground floor with three storeys of shopping rising above him in every direction, so vast and gleaming that he’d had to put his hand on a railing and take a breath.
The lechon was doing the same thing to him. Burnished to a shine and split, their cavities stuffed with lemongrass and spring onion, the air around them heavy with rendered fat and char. Behind Colin, the ballroom of the Manila Shangri-La churned with de la Vegas. The cousins circulated in clusters, their voices rising over a live band whose singer was doing something ambitious with a Whitney Houston number. Children darted between legs. An uncle Colin hadn’t been introduced to was conducting a loud negotiation near the bar about the karaoke rota, a laminated sheet he clutched in one hand like a man defending a land title.
Colin kept his eyes on the pig.
A hand appeared at the edge of his vision and snapped a shard of crackling off the nearest lechon’s flank. The sound was crisp and clean, like a biscuit breaking, and Diwa pressed the piece into Colin’s palm without looking at him, his fingers warm and greasy against Colin’s skin.
Colin had just closed his hand around it when a shadow fell across both of them.
Maki was enormous. Colin had known this from Diwa’s stories. Had deduced it from the depth of his voice that had rattled through Diwa’s mobile. But the physical reality of Kuya Maki at close range was something else entirely. He was taller than Lakan and broader than Rudolpho.
His hand came down on Diwa’s wrist with a crack that made Colin flinch.
“Oy!” Maki’s voice carried the flat boom of a foghorn. “Diwa! Hindi pa nag-start ang party!” He swatted at Diwa’s hand a second time for emphasis, the way you’d discipline a cat on a kitchen counter, before his gaze swung to Colin and his whole face changed. He nodded at the crackling in Colin’s fist. “Eat it. Eat it. It’s very fresh. Very good.”
Colin ate it. The crackling shattered between his teeth, the skin giving way to a layer of meat so tender it barely needed chewing. He closed his eyes for a second, because the pig deserved that much respect.
When he opened them, Maki was watching him.
