Emma woke before the roosters. Not from a pager, not from a nurse's call, but from heat that had nothing to do with weather. Her lips tingled as if the night still clung there, as if the dark itself remembered.
She lay still, watching the ceiling fan make slow circles, the steady hum pretending calm she did not feel. She tried the usual triage of a rational mind: label, explain, dismiss.
Impulse. Frustration. Adrenaline after an argument.
Two people pushed past the edge and then pulled back.
Except the memory didn't fade into a medical term. It lingered in images: his hand at her waist, the smell of leaves and soap, the way her name sounded when a man forgot how to be careful. Somewhere behind her ribs, something unlatched. A small door, maybe. Or a window that had been shut for far too long.
She sat up and touched her mouth with two fingers. The house breathed around her—the light at the curtains, the faint scrape of a lizard on the wall, the old wood settling. On the bedside table, the compass rested like a patient that no longer needed monitoring. Its needle, steady now, seemed to point not just to the forest but to a line running straight through her chest.
She found the leaf he'd pressed into her palm after the fight, still tied with twine, still faintly cool. She should have laughed at the absurdity of it—who patches a roof with a leaf?—but when she climbed the stool and tucked it carefully beneath the cracked panel, the wind changed. A hush, like a held breath. The thin whisper of incoming rain softened, diverted, as if the house itself had decided to hold.
"Fine," she murmured to the air. "You win this round."
By six she was dressed for Daet, hair neat, white coat folded over her arm. Before locking up, she paused at the door, palm against the jamb the way her lola used to do.
"Babalik ako mamaya," she said to the house. ("I'll be back later.")
The door seemed to sigh in answer.
—
St. Therese was already awake, the day sluicing into its routines. Emma's badge beeped green. She stepped into her clinic with a steadiness that surprised her. Patients waited; she knew what to do.
The first was a teen holding her mother's hand so tightly their knuckles whitened; Emma found the right words and the right privacy. The next was an older woman who spoke softly about hot flashes; Emma translated fear into information, symptoms into choices. A husband paced in the hallway while his wife's contractions slowed, sped, slowed again; Emma showed him how to breathe with her, how to count with, not at.
In between, she signed a supply request, corrected a rotation roster, answered a resident's trembling question with a calm that made the trembling stop.
And yet—underneath the competence, a different pulse beat. A thread tugged toward evening, toward a small house with a patched roof, toward the man who had kissed her like a secret coming up for air.
At noon she passed the maternity ward and stopped without meaning to. Through the glass, a new father cradled a baby as if it were a lantern that could burn him and bless him both. He pressed his forehead to the tiny cap and cried, half-laugh, half-sob.
Emma felt the ache like a bruise blooming. For years she had stood at this threshold for other people's beginnings, faithful and steady, the midwife of joy and terror. She had measured heartbeats, stitched skin, told truths. She had kept vigil for love she did not dare want for herself.
Thirty-five, she thought. Am I going to let fear decide the rest?
The loudspeaker crackled, someone called for a wheelchair, a monitor complained and then was appeased. The world pressed on.
—
Mariel found her at Julie's afterward, the same table by the window, a cup already cooling in Emma's hands.
"You look… different," Mariel said, dropping into the chair with the graceless grace of a doctor who never learned to sit delicately. "Glowy. Did you sleep?"
"Some," Emma lied.
Mariel squinted. "Hmm."
"What."
"You have that face."
"What face?"
"The I did something reckless and my soul liked it face."
Emma nearly choked on her coffee. "Mariel."
"Kidding. Kind of." Mariel grinned and stirred her latte, then sobered. "Okay, serious question. When was the last time you chose something just for you? Not for the hospital, not for your mother's opinion, not even for your lola's memory. Ikaw. (You.)"
Emma looked at the street instead of answering. A tricycle rattled past. A vendor crossed with a shallow tub of lumpia. Two nurses walked by laughing, relief written in their bodies.
"I don't know," she said finally. "Maybe never."
Mariel nodded as if she'd expected that. "You're very good at holding other people together."
"It's my job."
"It's your gift," Mariel corrected, gentle. "But gifts work both ways. The giving and the receiving. You don't have to keep living like you owe everyone your steadiness."
Emma toyed with the rim of her cup. "What if I choose something and it's a mistake?"
"Then you'll survive," Mariel said. "You aren't twenty-two anymore. You don't shatter. You bend, and then you stand."
Emma exhaled a laugh that turned into something else halfway out. "What if it's not a mistake?"
"Then," Mariel said, eyes warm, "you'll finally have a story that's yours."
They sat with that for a while, the noise of the café folding around them. When they stood to leave, Mariel squeezed her forearm, a brief pressure that landed with more force than its seconds allowed.
"Emma," she said. "Karapatan mong mahalin at mahalin pabalik. (You have the right to love and be loved in return.) Don't let your fear pretend it's wisdom."
Emma nodded, throat tight. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For saying it like it's simple."
"It is," Mariel said, then laughed. "And it isn't. But we both know that, right?"
They parted at the walkway. Emma walked back toward Admin, toward signatures and schedules. But the sentence stayed: You have the right to love.
—
The afternoon gathered itself into small storms: a consult gone longer than it should have because grief needed a chair; a delivery that insisted on waiting until the shift change; a supply officer who swore the suture kits had been ordered (they had not). Emma navigated with her usual patience, but by five her bones hummed with a different kind of anticipation.
She drove the road to Panganiban with the windows cracked. The air smelled of mango and wet dust, of something green holding its breath.
At the gate, the guava tree leaned in like an aunt trying to hear news. Emma let herself into the yard and paused. The patched leaf held, snug under the cracked panel, the sky above it fat with rain that had decided to delay. She touched the eave with her fingertips and felt—she couldn't explain it—a quiet, the kind that follows a choice made.
Inside, she put her bag on the chair, set her keys in the dish, lined her shoes neatly by the door. She brewed coffee she didn't need just to have something to hold. Then she stood at the window, the one that faced the first line of trees, and let the room dim around her without turning on a light.
She didn't rehearse the reasons. She'd used up reasons. She didn't summon scenarios or make doctors' lists with pro and con. She didn't call her mother (she wouldn't), or her father (he would only be kind and tired), or even Mariel (who had already said what needed saying).
She put a hand over her own heart and felt it answer, steady and sure.
"I choose you," she said, and her voice did not shake. "Whatever you are. Whoever you are. I choose you."
No one was there to hear it—no one human. The word hung in the air anyway, a small bell rung for no ceremony except itself.
Something in the house shifted. It might have only been the fan tick, or the lizard starting again on its wall route. But it felt like agreement. Emma closed her eyes and let the quiet fill her.
She did not open the compass. She didn't have to. The needle would point where it always pointed now: not north, but toward the line she had drawn through her own life.
After a while, she moved. She washed the single mug and left it to dry. She wrote call roofer on a scrap of paper and stuck it to the fridge. She laid out tomorrow's blouse on the back of a chair. Ordinary things, anchors against the current she had decided to let carry her.
Outside, thunder stitched a distant hem along the horizon.
—
At the edge of the trees, the wind brought him her words.
Adrian had not meant to come. He'd stood at the research station longer than necessary, rereading notes that were already precise, washing beakers that were already clean. He'd taken the long way out of Daet, slowed down on purpose at every curve where dogs liked to pretend they were traffic. He had promised himself he would keep away, give her space, stop making a map of her footsteps.
But the forest did what it always did with promises: listened, then answered with its own.
He felt the pull around the time the last jeepneys left the plaza. A thread tightened just under his skin, tugging toward the old house on the lane with the guava tree and the stubborn roof.
So he came, stopping where shadow could hold him, not crossing the line he'd crossed last night. The house lighted itself and then dimmed. A silhouette moved behind curtains. He told himself to turn back. He didn't.
When her voice lifted—soft but firm, a vow intended for no one but the walls and whatever gods listened—he felt the forest still. The small things quieted. Even the crickets paused between measures.
I choose you.
His hands found the rough bark of a trunk and held. He had been bracing for a different line—Stay away or Don't scare me or the more rational This is madness. Instead, she had stood in a lit square of her life and chosen a thing without evidence, without guarantees, without his coaxing or his mother's tea.
Hope is a skittish animal. It bolted, returned, flicked its tail, played at leaving again. He let it.
"Bathala," he whispered, not bargaining this time, not demanding. "Keep her safe. Keep me worthy."
A shape drifted on the path behind him, a taller shadow inside shadow. He didn't have to turn to know the way the cane touched earth.
"You heard," Magandá said, voice wrapped in leaves. Not triumph, not apology. The simple report of weather.
Adrian exhaled. "I heard."
"She chose with open eyes," his mother said. "That matters."
He didn't answer. The fight they'd had the night before was still raw, the edges unfiled. But he did not send her away. They stood together awhile, not quite side by side, looking at the modest house that had just become a place where a vow had been spoken.
"Don't meddle," he said finally, and there was less fire in it now. Only caution, only plea.
"I won't," she said. "Not with her will strong. But the forest will tell her what it must, in its time."
The old woman's cane tapped once and ceased. When he glanced, she was gone, replaced by the thinnest scent of ginger and honey.
He stayed until the light inside clicked off. He stayed longer than he should have. Then he left as quietly as he had come, his steps leaving no mark.
—
Emma slept without dreaming for the first time in weeks. No glowing trees, no almost-touch interrupted by too much light. Just the deep rest of someone who had stopped arguing with herself.
In the morning she'd have calls to make, charts to sign, a roof to repair. She'd have a friend to tell, perhaps, in the careful not-quite-naming way people tell the tenderest news. She'd have a forest to pretend not to listen to and a man to meet as though they were colleagues who had never broken into fire in a backyard.
But right now there was only the quiet certainty of the sentence she'd given the room. The house—her grandmother's house—held it for her the way a palm might hold a seed. Outside, the first light began its slow reach into the east. The season shifted a fraction, as if making room.
In another part of town, a tall man rinsed his face in a clay basin, tied his hair, and looked at his reflection without trying to solve it. He knew only this: when daylight came, he would not pretend nothing had changed. He would be careful with her fear, patient with her questions, true to the promise he had made a thousand nights in silence.
He would not take her choice from her by rushing it. He would not let his hunger name itself as destiny. He would meet her where she had stood—inside the ordinary—and wait for the moment the extraordinary asked for both of them.
For now, he smiled once into the blue that wasn't yet sky and spoke to no one.
"Good morning, Emma."
The wind carried the greeting toward the lane with the guava tree. In the house with the patched roof, a woman turned in her sleep and dreamed only of rain that did not fall.