The air in her pentoffice office was as cold and sterile as the future it promised. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Manila skyline glittered, a testament to progress, to glass-and-steel ambition. Maria Soledad "Sol" Alvaro had built a kingdom in those towers. ALVARO Pharmaceuticals was her legacy, a empire carved from nothing with sheer will, a ruthless mind, and a heart she had long since locked away to keep it from breaking.
At forty-five, she was at the pinnacle of success. And she had never been more empty.
The holographic charts before her swam, the quarterly profit margins blurring into meaningless lines. The pressure was a physical weight on her chest, a constant, tightening vise that no amount of antacids could soothe. It was the pressure of expectations—from her board, from her investors, from her family who she had lifted from a sari-sari store to a gated subdivision and who now expected her to be their perpetual golden goose.
Her phone buzzed, skittering across the obsidian desk. The screen lit up with a photo of her mother, smiling beside the very same small store that had started it all. The caller ID read: Nanay.
Sol let it go to voicemail. She knew what it would be. The same gentle, worried questions. "Are you eating, 'Nes? When will you come visit? Your Tita Maricel's grandson is a doctor, very handsome… you're not getting any younger, anak."
The expectations were a different kind of cage. First, to pull the family up. Check. Then, to expand, to innovate, to become an international titan. Check. To be the perfect daughter, the flawless CEO, the sophisticated woman who lacked for nothing.
Except a life.
She had traded it all for this view. For the quiet hum of the air conditioner that drowned out the world. Her personal life was a series of calendar invites she always declined. Love had been a liability she could not afford.
A sharp, hot pain lanced through her chest, stealing her breath. It was a familiar visitor lately, a tightness she blamed on stress and too much coffee. She fumbled in her desk drawer, her hand brushing against a small, velvet box.
She paused, the pain receding for a moment. She pulled the box out.
Inside, nestled on black silk, was a pendant. It was an old, intricate thing, silver etched with patterns that seemed to swirl if you stared too long. She'd found it years ago in a dusty antique shop in Binondo, a world away from the gleaming towers of Makati. It had called to her. On a whim, she'd bought it for herself on her last birthday. A gift for the woman who had everything and nothing.
It felt cool in her palm. Heavy. Not with the weight of gold, but with something else. A history she could almost feel. As her thumb traced the strange, looping patterns, the world outside the window seemed to soften and fade.
The pain returned, not a lance but a sledgehammer. It crushed the air from her lungs. The pendant slipped from her fingers as she gasped, clutching her chest. The gleaming desk, the rain-streaked skyline, the reflection of a woman who had climbed so high only to fall alone—it all dissolved into a roaring, silent darkness.
The last thing she felt was the cold metal of the locket against her skin.
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The Philippines, 1890
The first thing she was aware of was the smell. Not of rain and disinfectant, but of calamansi blossoms, burning coconut husks, and the faint, sweet scent of tsampaka flowers.
The second thing was the pain. Not the sharp, final pain of a heart giving out, but a deep, throbbing ache in her head and a fire in her lungs. A child's pain.
She was small. Terrifyingly small. Her body was a fragile, feverish prison. Voices swam around her, low and anxious.
"...the fever will break, or it will take her, Doña Clara. We have done all we can."
"Pray, mija," another voice, ancient and cracked with tears, whispered close to her ear. A cool, wrinkled hand smoothed her hair. "You must fight. You are my strong girl. My Ines."
Ines. The name was a key, turning in a lock deep inside her.
Memories, two sets of them, swirled in the fever-dream. Skyscrapers and carriages. The hum of a computer and the chirp of crickets. The taste of imported espresso and the taste of warm tsampurado. Boardroom battles and scraped knees from falling in the garden.
Maria Soledad Alvaro. Ines Alvaro de Villa-Real.
The modern woman fought against the confusion, a drowning swimmer in the consciousness of a six-year-old child. She saw flashes. A stern, handsome father. A beautiful, distant mother. A vast, airy house with capiz shell windows. And the woman by her bedside—her lola, her grandmother. The only source of unconditional love in this new, old world.
The child's memories loved her lola fiercely. The woman's memories ached with a loss she hadn't yet experienced.
The grandmother's voice came again, soft and secret. "I must go on a long journey, anak. But I leave this with you. It has always protected our family. The women of our line. Keep it secret. Keep it safe."
Something cool and metallic was pressed into her small, burning hand. Her fingers curled around it on instinct. It was the pendant. Her pendant.
The connection was instantaneous. A jolt, like a circuit completing.
The two fractured streams of memory—the CEO and the child—slammed together, fused into a single, terrifying, brilliant whole. She understood. The impossible truth. The second chance she never asked for.
She opened her eyes, the fever breaking in a wave of cold sweat.
She saw her grandmother's face, etched with love and sorrow. She saw the room, a scene from a history book. She felt the weight of the locket in her hand, humming with a potential she could not yet name.
The old woman smiled, a tear tracing a path through the wrinkles on her cheek. "There you are," she whispered. "My Ines."
The child's heart broke with love. The woman's heart broke with knowing. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her more than the fever ever had, that her grandmother would die tonight.
She was alone. Again. But this time, she was not empty-handed.
Her small fist clenched tightly around the silver heirloom. It was not just a piece of jewelry. It was a tether to a self she thought she'd lost. It was a promise. It was a weapon.
In the silence of the room, broken only by the labored breathing of her dying grandmother, a single thought crystallized in the mind of the woman inside the child:
Never again.