Page 32 of Signal No. Us

“Let me just — I should call her. I should just check —”

“Allan.” Robby caught his wrist, gentle, before he could dial. “She’s sitting up, talking normally, no dizziness. Tita Becky’s exact words, not mine. If I thought it was serious, I’d already be on the motorcycle, and you’d be behind me.”

“You said ‘probably.’”

“I say probably about everything,” Robby said. “It’s a work habit. Doesn’t mean I’m not sure.” He turned Allan’s hand over in his, thumb pressing once against his pulse point like he was taking it on purpose. “You want to call her, call her. But call her because you want to hear her voice, not because you think this is the text you got in Manila all over again. It isn’t. I promise, if it were, we’d already be moving.”

Allan made himself breathe, the reflex slowly losing its grip. He called anyway, mostly because Robby was right and he needed to hear it for himself: Cora answered on the second ring, mildly annoyed at being interrupted mid-crossword, more insulted by Tita Becky’s theatrics than by her own blood pressure, and hung up on him inside ninety seconds with a brisk “I’m fine, anak, go enjoy your date” that did more for Allan’s nervous system than anything else could have.

“Well?” Robby asked, watching him pocket the phone.

“She’s annoyed that I called,” Allan said, and felt himself actually relax for the first time since the phone had rung. “That’s usually a good sign.”

The word cost sat between them anyway, unspoken: another possible trip to Virac, another set of fees the household would have to absorb on top of everything else, and underneath it, the quieter fact Allan hadn’t let himself fully look at yet: that loving someone here didn’t come with a schedule that asked permission first, and neither did his mother’s health.

They ended up eating the suman and dried mangoes Robby had packed as backup, “In case,” he admitted, “something went wrong.” They sat side by side on the sand with their shoes off, the failed sinigang pot forgotten between them, the tide creeping in slow enough to ignore for another hour at least.

CHAPTER 16

Word traveled through Barangay Espiritu Santo just like it always had, not through any one dramatic announcement, but through the sheer, unstoppable osmosis of tita-to-tita transmission, until by the third day nobody could quite remember who had “found out” first and everybody agreed they’d known all along.

“I knew it all along,” Tita Yolanda announced at breakfast, with the serene confidence of someone rewriting history in real time. “The first time I saw you two together, I said, ‘there’s chemistry.’”

“You literally tried to set me up with a seaman when I got here,” Allan said.

“Can’t I have both,” she said, unbothered. “Just a backup plan.”

Tita Becky and Tita Gemma had already, apparently, settled a bet, the specifics of which no one would explain to Allan directly, though it involved a sum of money and something called “the June deadline,” which made him deeply afraid to ask further.

Jake, predictably, made the most noise about it. He arrived at the cinema the morning after the karaoke night, already holding two mugs of coffee, one of which he presented to Allan with the ceremony of a man bestowing a medal.

“Congratulations,” he announced. “You two are officially gossip-worthy. You know, we used to have a separate group chat, ‘Robby Watch 2013.’ We shut it down when Ver said you weren’t planning on coming back. It’s alive again.”

“You had a group chat monitoring Robby’s crush on me? Did everyone know except me?”

“We’d been, what’s the word kids use these days—shipping—you two since high school,” Jake confirmed, entirely unashamed. “And it wasn’t just us. Our guidance counselor was in on it too, secretly. The whole faculty room too—they just thought we didn’t know they were.”

“This is deeply invasive.”

“That’s the barangay for you,” Jake said, shrugging. “No privacy, way too much love. Package deal.”

“I genuinely don’t know how to feel about this.”

“Just accept it,” Jake said. “It’s easier. Look at Robby—he’s been accepting it for more than ten years already.”

Robby took the sudden, cheerful surveillance of the entire barangay with far more grace than Allan expected, mostly by leaning into it: showing up to help with mural supplies and staying for dinner without being asked twice, letting Tita Gemma fuss over whether he was eating enough, enduring Tita Becky’s increasingly unsubtle questions about “intentions” with the patient good humor of a man who had, apparently, decided the whole barangay’s opinion was a price worth paying.

“Doesn’t it embarrass you?” Allan asked one evening, watching Robby field yet another round of interrogation from the porch while pretending to fix a fence post that did not, as far as Allan could tell, need fixing.

“Why would it embarrass me?” Robby asked, setting down his hammer. “I spent so many years too scared to show it. I’m done with that. If I got scared now, what is all this even for?”

“That’s disgustingly mature of you.”

“I’ve been practicing,” Robby said. “Also, I have a therapist. In Legazpi.”

“You have a therapist?”

“My job is rescue and disaster response,” Robby said, like this should have been obvious. “If I didn’t have a therapist, I’d have fallen apart a long time ago.”