Page 43 of Signal No. Us

Ms. Padilla’s face did a valiant, professional job of hiding her surprise. “Can I ask why? We really do think this could be a great fit⁠—”

“It’s not the right fit for where my life is right now,” Allan said. “I have something else I’m building, and it needs all of me. I hope you understand.”

He shook their hands on the way out, genuinely without rancor this time, no old grudge left to nurse, no need to prove anything to a room that had, in the end, just been a room, full of people doing their jobs just like he used to do his.

Outside, Manila’s noise hit him full force, jeepneys, construction, someone’s karaoke bleeding out of a nearby carinderia, and he stood there a moment on the sidewalk, letting it wash over him without the old ache of belonging that used to come with it.

He called Robby the second he found a quiet enough corner.

“How’d it go?” Robby answered, tension audible even through the static.

“I turned it down,” Allan said, and felt the words settle into something solid and true the second they left his mouth. “I don’t need that anymore, Robby. I know that now.”

There was a beat of silence on the other end, relief, Allan guessed, or maybe just the particular quiet of someone who’d been holding his breath for a week and finally let it go.

“You sure?” Robby asked, careful, giving him every chance to take it back.

“Sure,” Allan said. “I’m coming home for good. I’ll tell you everything once I’m there. But I wanted you to know right away: I turned it down, and I don’t regret it, not even a little.”

“Home is not a prize you win by being successful,” Robby said, quiet, and Allan recognized it. “You were right back then. You’re still right.”

“When did I say that to you?”

“You didn’t,” Robby admitted. “I read it in your sketchbook when I was helping you get back up on the scaffolding. Sorry, it just happened.”

“You’ve been reading my sketchbook.”

“Just once,” Robby said, entirely unashamed. “Turns out you’ve got some good lines in there. Might use one for the mural.”

“I hate you,” Allan said, laughing, the first real, unguarded laugh he’d managed since landing.

“I love you too,” Robby said, easy, like it cost him nothing at all to say it now, and Allan realized, standing on a noisy Manila sidewalk two thousand kilometers from home, that it was the first time either of them had said it plainly, without a joke to hide behind.

“Remember the two systems,” Allan said, “from the ridge? You never actually told me which one we turned out to be.”

“I know which one,” Robby said.

“Yeah?”

“We merged. Weeks ago. I just didn’t want to say it before you did, in case it scared you off.” A beat, and Allan could hear him almost smiling through the static. “Too late to drift apart now, Allan. You’re stuck being half a storm system with me.”

“Say that again when I’m actually there,” Allan said, throat tight. “I want to see your face when you do.”

“I’ll say it,” Robby promised. “Over and over, if I have to. Just come home.”

“I’m coming home,” Allan said, and meant it in every sense the word could hold.

CHAPTER 25

The workshop the next morning was, appropriately, held in a covered basketball court in a resettlement site on the city’s edge, folding tables, borrowed crayons, forty kids who’d all lived through some version of the same flood.

“This is our house,” one boy explained, showing Allan a drawing of a house with a boat parked improbably on its roof. “That’s where we slept when the water rose.”

“Were you scared?” Allan asked.

“A little,” the boy admitted. “But we have a story. The old folks always say, ‘Matumba man ng sakuna, babangon pa din kami.’ So it’s not just being scared. It’s knowing you’re not alone.”

Allan copied that line into his own sketchbook before he could stop himself, some instinct telling him it belonged somewhere in the mural back home, maybe painted small along the bottom edge where the tide line would go.