NOVEMBER 2025
ISAAC
The rain over Manila always sounds like gravel hitting the glass. I sat at the edge of our kitchen table, the ceramic mug in my hands cooling fast, watching the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of Lillian's shoulders across the room. She was bent over her laptop, her spine curved into a sharp, defensive angle that looked like it hurt.
She paused, lifting her cup to take a sip of her coffee—black, bitter, and hurried. It wasn't something she enjoyed; it was just a task to finish.
Looking at her now, I was pulled back to the lecture halls of Diliman. Even then, in our Philippine Literature classes, she had been a shadow in the back row, always seated near the exit, half-hidden by the heavy drapes. I used to watch her parse through complex verses of Rizal, her pen flying across the margins, translating worlds I couldn't see.
I had married that mystery, and living together had changed nothing. As she stood up to clear the plates, moving past me like a polite ghost in our narrow hallway, I realized the bitter truth: Lillian was still a closed book, and I was no closer to learning the language she was written in.
But I knew better now. I knew the language existed. I just wasn't allowed to speak it.
My eyes drifted to the small plastic remote sitting on the counter, and the memory pulled me backward, that Tuesday during the third week of our second month.
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APRIL 2022
The boardroom had been a pressure cooker all afternoon, and by the time I punched the passcode into our apartment lock, my bones felt like lead. I expected the usual layout of our evenings: the low hum of the refrigerator and Lillian's quiet, mechanical "Welcome home" from the kitchen.
Instead, I heard it.
I froze with my coat half-off, the sound so foreign it made my chest hitch. It was a rhythmic, breathless trill—a genuine laugh.
I crept toward the living room, my pulse hammering against my ribs for no reason I could name. There she was, bathed in the blue glow of the television. She wasn't just smiling; her head was thrown back, her shoulders shaking with a joy so raw it felt like an intrusion to watch.
On the screen, a grainy, seven-year-old version of me was losing a backyard fight with a garden hose and a very confused golden retriever. It was an embarrassing relic my mother had digitized, yet Lillian looked at the screen like she was discovering a secret map. Her eyes, usually so guarded, were bright and wet with mirth.
In that single beat, the exhaustion didn't just fade—it vanished. I reached for the wall remote to hide my embarrassment, but my hand stalled in mid-air. I didn't want to shut off the video. I wanted to stop time. I wanted to bottle that sound and keep it in my pocket.
Then, she saw me.
The laughter died instantly, pulled back into her throat like a caught breath. The light in her eyes flickered out, replaced by that familiar, polite shutter she always wore for me.
"Isaac. You're home," she said, her voice dropping right back into its soft, neutral rhythm.
After that night, I started staying late at the office. Not because of the paperwork—I finished that by five—but because I became a guardian of her solitude. I imagined her alone in the living room, free from the weight of being watched, letting that hidden girl out to play.
I'll go home late, don't wait for me. - Isaac
I'd scribble the same line on a green post-it note, leaving it on the counter like a peace offering. It was a calculated retreat. I was giving her the only thing I thought she truly wanted from this arrangement: a house without me in it.
But the more I tried to engineer her space, the more the small things began to ache. I noticed how she took her coffee—black, bitter, and hurried, like it was a task to finish rather than something to enjoy. I noticed the sharp angle of her shoulders when she leaned over her laptop until her spine must have screamed.
It started with an egg. Just one.
I woke up at 5:00 AM, the sun still a bruised purple against the Manila skyline. I told myself I was just hungry, but as I moved through the kitchen, I found myself plating a second portion. I toasted the bread exactly how I liked it, then realized I was pulling hers out early, making it lighter because she seemed like someone who shouldn't have to deal with anything burnt.
I left the plate under a silver cloche with my note and retreated to the hallway.
From the shadow of the doorway, I watched her find it. She didn't laugh this time, but she paused. She touched the stainless-steel rim of the plate with a lingering finger, a small, puzzled crease forming between her brows.
———————————————————
NOVEMBER 2025
A chime from the bread toaster flooded the kitchen, snapping me back to the present.
Lillian set her empty cup down on the kitchen counter, the ceramic clicking softly against the stone. She caught me looking at her. Instantly, the thin, practiced smile slid into place on her face, masking whatever she had been thinking a second before.
"Do you need more coffee?" she asked.
I looked at the blue post-it notes sitting in the drawer right next to her hand, then at the tired lines around her eyes, a strange, terrifying warmth bloomed behind my ribs—a feeling that had nothing to do with the black coffee in my hand, and everything to do with the woman at my table.
————————————————————
The drive back from Lillian's family dinner and Liam's proposal was a descent into the gray. Whatever warmth we had shared over the meal faded the moment the car door hummed shut, sealing us back into reality.
I'll have a business trip on Cebu for a week. Her uncle's and my father's critical remarks about her during our last board meeting still left a sour taste in my mouth, and the thought of leaving her alone while I traveled made me uncomfortable and worried more than I was willing to admit.
"I have a business trip this coming Tuesday," I said, keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead on the dashboard.
"Will you be okay?"
"Don't worry. I'll be fine," she said.
Fine. The most dangerous word in her vocabulary.
My knuckles turned white against the steering wheel, the leather groaning under a grip I didn't realize was so tight. In the quiet of the parked car, I watched the rhythmic flicker of the lights wash over Lillian's profile.
Come with me to Cebu, I pleaded silently.
I pictured our family's private villa—the way the tide swallowed the shore in a slow, salt-thick hush, the smell of sun-drenched wood, and the absolute absence of phones, contracts, or deadlines. I wanted to take her there, to give her a real rest—the kind where you forget the shape of your own burdens.
I opened my mouth, the invitation perched on the tip of my tongue, but the air in the car felt incredibly fragile. If I spoke, would I be invading that sanctuary I had worked so hard to build for her? Would my presence just be another project she felt she had to manage?
The words died, turning to lead in my throat. I looked at her—so resilient, yet so thin—and forced my fingers to relax on the wheel.
"Just call me if something happens," I managed to say.
She smiled that tired, distant smile. "Ok."
I watched her walk toward the stairs, her silhouette graceful and retreating. She was counting down the days until the end of the contract. She was waiting for her freedom. And I was standing alone in the dark, wondering when the hell I had started hoping the contract would never end.
———————————————————
LILLIAN
The three days Isaac spent in Cebu were the quietest the apartment had ever been. Without the mechanical rhythm of his early morning departures or his midnight returns, the space felt less like a home and more like a waiting room.
On Tuesday afternoon, I met my attorney in a sterile, fluorescent-lit coffee shop in Makati. Passing the signed annulment petition across the small mahogany table felt strangely weightless. It was just paper—a collection of legal terms like irreconcilable differences and termination of marital ties—yet it carried the absolute weight of an ending.
"Once filed, the process moves quickly, Mrs. Ramirez," the lawyer had said, slipping the document into his leather briefcase. "Are your post-marriage arrangements secure?"
"They will be," I told him.
But as I drove back to the empty apartment, the truth was much more formless. I didn't just want to leave the marriage; I wanted to leave the orbit of my family, the suffocating reach of Tito Lucian, and the humid, crowded pressure of Manila itself. I needed somewhere cold. Somewhere old. A place where nobody knew the name Lillian.
That night, with the city hum muted by the closed glass doors of the balcony, I opened my laptop. I bypassed the standard expat destinations—Singapore, Vancouver, London—and let my fingers drift to a map of Western Ireland.
I found a listing in Roundstone, a small coastal village in Connemara. The photos showed a modest, stone-fronted apartment perched over the Atlantic, where the gray sea met an equally gray sky. The description spoke of turf fires, low stone walls, and a quiet so profound you could hear the Atlantic swell against the harbor walls. It was thousands of miles away. It looked lonely, but it was a clean, honest kind of loneliness—one I would choose for myself, rather than one forced upon me by a contract.
I emailed the landlord, offering a deposit before I could talk myself out of it. A clean break, I told myself as I closed the screen. A language I don't have to learn.
———————————————————
It was already past ten when I finally made it back home. I dropped my bag by the door and collapsed onto the couch, feeling the exhaustion seep into my bones like freezing water. The house was too quiet: the kind that made the space feel bigger, emptier, and lonelier.
My eyes drifted to the framed wedding photograph hanging above the console table. Isaac stood beside me, one hand wrapped around mine. Just enough to look convincing.
For years, I have measured my life by the slow, agonizing wait for this marriage to finally break, dreaming of the day I'd finally claim my freedom. But somehow, I had convinced myself that things might change, that I might have a hope, a future, one far richer than this cold, legal arrangement.
During the first week of our second month of contractual marriage, the memory of that night at the gala still felt like a bruise on my mind.
———————————————————
APRIL 2022
It had been a grueling six-hour marathon of performance—smiling for the cameras, nodding at business associates, and pretending that my hand tucked into the crook of Isaac's arm wasn't just a staged prop.
By the time we reached the foyer of our house, my feet were screaming. I had barely made it to the edge of the couch before I collapsed, my breath catching as I tried to peel the leather away from my skin.
"Don't," Isaac stopped me.
His voice wasn't sharp; it was quiet, authoritative in a way that made me pause. He had already discarded his jacket, his white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Without a word, he knelt on the floor in front of me.
I froze.
He reached out, his large hands surprisingly gentle as he took my ankle and eased the shoe off. My breath hitched, not from the pain of the raw, angry blister on my heel, but from the sudden proximity of him. He didn't look up. He just reached into a small kit he must have grabbed from the sideboard and began to clean the wound.
The sting of the antiseptic was sharp, but his touch was steady. For a moment, the "contract" vanished. There was no corporate merger, no audience. There was just the warmth of his thumb brushing against my skin as he applied a bandage.
I looked down at the crown of his head, his dark hair slightly mussed. My heart gave a traitorous, violent thud.
"You should choose more practical footwear for the next event, Lillian," he muttered, his eyes still fixed on my foot.
In the week that followed the gala, that memory became a seed I hadn't intended to plant.
I started leaving the office at four instead of seven. I found myself standing in the gourmet aisle of the grocery store, spending entirely too long selecting a specific bag of hazelnut and woodsmoke coffee beans because I remembered him pouring a similar blend on our second morning together.
Every evening, I set the apartment to face him. I straightened the rug by the entryway where his shoes always scuffed the edge. I adjusted the living room lamps so the harsh overhead glare wouldn't hit his eyes after a long day in the boardroom. I sat at the dining table under the heavy chandelier, listening to the ticking of the industrial clock, my eyes darting to the front door. Every time the headlights of a passing car swept across the window, my chest tightened.
I was waiting for the man who knelt.
But as the second month bled into the fourth, Isaac's schedule became a map of avoidance.
The headlights stopped turning into our driveway before midnight. By the time I woke up, the kitchen counter held only a packed breakfast and a washed mug drying on the rack. He was moving through the apartment like a ghost, leaving behind perfectly curated traces of care—but never himself. He was feeding me, yet starving me of his presence.
One Friday evening, after three hours of watching the candles on the table burn down to stubs of wax, I finally blew them out.
The next morning, I stopped adjusting the lamps. I let the entryway rug stay crooked. I put the hazelnut coffee beans at the very back of the highest cabinet, out of sight, and bought the cheapest, bitterest dark roast I could find. If he wanted a house empty of himself, I would stop trying to soften the edges for him.
I began to build my own wall, brick by brick, until the only thing left between us was the legal fiction of a marriage and the silent countdown to my departure.
________________________________________
NOVEMBER 2025
My phone buzzed.
I swiped the screen, two notifications sat side by side. The first was an official notice; the court had received my annulment petition. The paper trail of my freedom had officially begun. Right beneath it was an email from a landlord in Roundstone. It's finally going where it should be. Soon enough, I'll have my freedom.
I checked the time. 11:07 PM, but sleep was impossible.
I stepped closer to the ledge, letting the breeze cut through the restlessness. I wrapped my arms around myself, staring out at the fractured grid of the city skyline.
"Can't sleep?"
I nearly jumped. I turned to find Isaac standing in the doorway, still in his suit, his tie loosened, hair messy from the long flight. Three days had passed since we last spoke; I hadn't expected him back tonight.
"I didn't mean to startle you," he said. He stepped up to the railing, leaving enough space between us that the distance still felt enormous. He didn't look at me; instead, his thumbs tracked the cold metal of the bar, rubbing against the brass surface.
For a long moment, the only sound was the distant roar of the highway below. Two people looking at the exact same view, lost in different versions of it.
Isaac unbuttoned his cuffs, rolling the sleeves up his forearms with slow, deliberate precision. "Is something wrong?"
My chest tightened. I looked down at my hands, wishing the truth felt lighter than it did. "I filed a petition for annulment..."
His hands froze on his sleeve. His jaw tightened, the muscle pulsing once against his skin. "We still have a month," he said, staring straight ahead into the dark. "We made an agreement."
"I know." My voice splintered, betraying the steady breath I forced into my lungs. "It'll take time. We'll... remain married until it's finalized." A faint, almost hysterical smile tugged at my lips as I forced myself to meet his eyes. "I just thought I'd spare us both the trouble. You already have enough on your plate."
Isaac took a long, controlled breath, his broad shoulders stiffening before he slowly dropped his head. He looked down at his shoes, the shadow of the balcony overhang cutting across his face.
The silence between us grew suffocating. Finally, he shifted, turning his torso toward me. His eyes flicked up, meeting mine for a single, fracturing second. A current of something raw and unsaid—sorrow, disappointment, or maybe a question he had spent months burying—flashed across his gaze before he shut it down, looking back out at the horizon.
"Lillian."
My name sounded tired in his voice.
"Was there ever a moment..."
He stopped, his fingers tightened around the railing.
"Did you ever stay because you wanted to?"
The question hit harder than it should have. I opened my mouth, but the cool air caught in my throat, leaving me completely empty of words.
Isaac waited, counting the seconds in the silence. When no answer came, he let go of the railing and stepped back, retreating into the shadows of the doorway where the light couldn't catch his expression.
"I'll handle the papers," he said, his posture slumping as if a physical brace had been removed from his spine. He turned on his heel, his leather shoes striking the hardwood inside the apartment with a heavy, hollow rhythm.
Near the threshold, he paused, keeping his back to me. "Ireland... you don't have to hide it from me, I'll take care of everything until you leave the country. As... as payment for your service."
He walked away, his shadow disappearing into the interior hallway.
I stood frozen for a moment, the cool night air biting at my skin as I stared at the empty space where he had just been. My pulse echoed in my ears, loud and unsteady, matching the chaotic rhythm of my thoughts.
I wanted freedom. I wanted to stop hurting. But as I watched his retreating shadow, it didn't feel like a victory. My chest tightened with a pain I couldn't name.
I remained on the balcony. The night air felt colder now.
Below us, the city continued shining as if nothing had changed.
But something had.
I felt it.
In the empty space beside me.
In the unfinished question he left behind.
Did you ever stay because you wanted to?
My fingers tightened around the railing.
As the city lights flickered far below, I wondered...
If I had just let go of something...
Someone...
I never truly understood.