Page 37 of Signal No. Us

Allan reached over and took Robby’s hand, the way Robby had reached for his in the library weeks ago, slow, giving him every chance to pull back.

“This is the part you never told me,” Allan said. “Not really. Not what it’s actually like, standing where you stand every single year. I get it now. Why you’re always a little bit braced for something.”

“I can’t lose you like that,” Robby said, and it wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t performed, just flat and terrified and true. “Not like, not the way I lost her. I can survive you leaving for Manila. I don’t know if I can survive that.”

“I’m not going anywhere tonight,” Allan said, and reached for the rest of the reassurance automatically, the way he always did when a conversation got too close to something he couldn’t fix with a sentence.

Robby pulled his hand back, gentle about it, but firm.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do the thing where you make it smaller so it’s easier to hold,” Robby said. “I almost watched you go under a river tonight. And underneath being scared about that, I’m still exactly as angry as I was at dinner two hours ago. Both things are true at the same time. I don’t need you to fix that for me right now. I just need you to let it be true.”

Allan sat with that, the reassurance dying in his throat.

“Okay,” he said finally.

They didn’t talk much on the ride back, Robby’s hands steady on the wheel in a way that felt, to Allan, like the opposite of comfort, careful in the deliberate way people were careful with something they were trying not to drop.

Robby’s phone buzzed once against the dashboard, Ver’s name lighting up the screen, something about the reception hall’s backup generator, entirely unaware that this particular night had already had its own emergency. Robby glanced at it, didn’t answer, and kept driving.

At the gate, Robby cut the engine and didn’t get out right away.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I need you to know that comes first, before anything else I say tonight.”

“Okay.”

“But I keep doing the math,” Robby said. “If that current had taken you all the way, the last real thing between us would’ve been you hiding something from me for two weeks. That’s what I keep landing on. Not the water. That.”

“Robby—”

“I’m not trying to punish you with it,” Robby said, cutting him off gently. “I just need you to know it’s still there. Tonight didn’t erase it. It just scared me into remembering how much it would’ve mattered if I’d never gotten the chance to say so.”

He got out of the truck then, and for a second Allan thought he might offer a hand, the way he always did, but he didn’t, not this time, just walked ahead toward the house with his shoulders set in a way Allan recognized from ten years of watching people decide, silently, how much distance felt safe.

Outside, Signal No. 2 held through the rest of the night and dropped to Signal No. 1 by morning, and somewhere past the riverside houses, a boy who still owed Allan an apology about his line work slept through the rest of the storm in a borrowed cot, safe, dry, and entirely unaware of how close a Tuesday had come to being the kind of story the barangay told for years.

Robby didn’t reach for his hand again before they reached the house.

It wasn’t anger exactly, not anymore, though he kept his hands to himself the whole walk back to the house, close enough that Allan could feel the heat coming off his arm, careful never to close the last few inches between them. Allan recognized the shape of it now, from a decade of watching titas do the same thing over lesser slights: tampo, the particular, cold-shouldered quiet that wasn’t punishment so much as a wound too raw yet to be touched, gone the second it was actually addressed, but not one second sooner.

CHAPTER 20

Allan couldn’t stay in the house a second longer, not with the sound of Robby’s footsteps down the front steps still ringing in his ears. Ten years of practice, apparently, at watching someone walk away from him, and it turned out he still had none at all for being the one who’d made someone else do the walking.

He told himself he was going to the cinema to apologize. He was fairly sure that was true.

The lobby light was on when he got there, and for one held breath he thought Robby might still be inside, until he pushed the door open and found Ver instead, alone at the little folding table, a spreadsheet of wedding seating charts open in front of him that he was very obviously not looking at.

“You missed him,” Ver said, not glancing up right away, giving Allan the same option to deflect that he was clearly extending to himself. “By, I don’t know, twenty minutes.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Home, probably. Or to go stare at the sea and pretend he’s not upset, which is basically the Castañeda family hobby.” Ver finally looked up. “You look terrible, by the way.”

“Thank you.”