CHAPTER 1.1

Café Hilig exists in the particular manner of places that have never needed to advertise themselves. It is down a side street in Poblacion, in a building that looks from the outside like it might be a law office or perhaps a very serious someone's private residence, with dark wooden shutters and a small brass plate beside the door that says only the name and nothing else — no hours, no menu teaser, no social media handle stencilled in careful chalk. You find Café Hilig the way you find most good things: because someone who already loves it takes you there, and then you bring someone else, and it spreads quietly, person to person, the way things that deserve to last always do.

Inside it is warm in the specific way of places with high ceilings and low lighting and wooden floors that have been walked on long enough to develop a particular resonance underfoot — a soft, knowing creak that somehow makes the room feel inhabited rather than merely occupied. The walls are bookshelves. Not decorative ones — not the kind of bookshelves where everything is arranged by colour and nothing has ever been read. These are working bookshelves, organised by some private logic, packed with volumes of different heights and ages, some with receipts and folded papers tucked between the pages, some with their spines bent from being held open too many times. They smell like good coffee and old paper and something underneath that I have never been able to name but that always makes me feel, for the duration of my time inside these walls, that I am in exactly the right place.

I spot them before they spot me. This is almost always the way of it. I have been spotting this particular group of people in crowded rooms since we were young enough that crowded rooms were school hallways and the stakes were nothing more than where to sit at lunch. The instinct has not dimmed with age.

They are at the table in the back-left corner, the one with the low pendant light and the bench seat along the wall, the one that fits exactly four people if those four people are willing to be slightly closer together than strangers would tolerate. They are always willing. They have been willing for years.

Ruvan sees me first.

Ruvan De Luna

He is already half-standing by the time I am three steps inside the door, which is simply what Ruvan does — he rises to meet people, not out of formality but out of some deep, unreasoning generosity of body, as though his first instinct upon seeing someone he loves is always to move toward them. He is tall enough that the pendant light catches the top of his head and leaves his face in warm shadow, and he is grinning — the wide, easy, impossible-to-resist grin that has been getting him forgiven for things since adolescence. He is wearing a linen shirt the colour of warm sand, untucked, sleeves rolled to the elbow in the casual way of a person who started the day formal and then thought better of it. There are laugh lines at the corners of his eyes that were not there five years ago. They suit him absolutely. Ruvan is one of those people who improves with time the way good wood improves — richer, warmer, more itself. He waves at me with the hand that is not holding a coffee cup and the wave is so entirely, characteristically Ruvan — big and unhurried and slightly ridiculous — that something in me that had been tight all morning releases without my permission.

"You're early," he says, when I reach the table. He sounds delighted. He sounds the way he always sounds when I do something that defies his expectations, which is not often enough, apparently, to have stopped surprising him.

"I'm on time," I say, which is different, and he knows it is different, and he sits back down laughing anyway.

I slide into the seat across from him and find, immediately, Aven's hand on my wrist — the brief, warm, entirely habitual greeting she has been offering me since we were sixteen and she decided, apparently permanently, that the correct way to say hello to me was through contact rather than words.

Aven Cruz

She is sitting sideways on the bench, one knee pulled up, her coffee held in both hands the way people hold things when the warmth of the object is part of the point. Aven has the kind of face that is always mid-expression — always in the process of feeling something and allowing the feeling to travel to the surface without the usual internal negotiations most people conduct. Her hair is shorter than the last time I saw her, cut bluntly at the jaw in a way that makes her face look sharper and more itself. She is wearing earrings I have not seen before — long, hammered-gold things that move when she moves, which is constantly, because Aven does not hold still. She never has. She processes the world through motion, through expression, through the specific electricity of a body that is always, always engaged. She is watching me the way she always watches me — with the particular quality of attention that makes you feel simultaneously very seen and very safe. Aven Cruz has been reading me since we were teenagers. She has never once gotten it wrong.

"You look tired," she says, immediately and without preamble, because this is also something she has always done — said the true thing first, before pleasantries could get in the way of it.

"I look fine."

"You look fine and tired." She squeezes my wrist once before releasing it. "The Reyes call?"

"Extended for Q3. It went well."

"I didn't ask how it went. I asked if it tired you."

I pick up the menu, which I do not need because I already know what I am going to order, but which gives my hands something to do while my face does whatever it needs to do. "Everything's fine, Aven."

She makes a sound that communicates, without words, that she is filing this response under things Veyra says when she does not want to discuss something, and that the file is already quite full, and that she will return to it later, when I am less defended. She is always right that there will be a later. I am always slightly relieved that she does not push before I am ready.

A sound from my right — the specific crash of someone who has misjudged the width of a narrow space and compensated with cheerful aggression rather than grace.

Zephy Delos Reyes

She materialises into the seat beside me with the particular momentum of a person who moves through the world at a speed slightly higher than the world was designed for. She is still unwinding a scarf — green, long, the kind that takes three full rotations to remove — with one hand while setting her bag on the floor with the other and simultaneously checking her phone and pushing her hair out of her face, all of these things happening at once and none of them completed before the next one begins. Zephy has never done one thing at a time in her life. She operates in a permanent state of enthusiastic parallel processing. She is wearing mismatched earrings — one hoop, one stud — and I am not certain whether this is intentional or whether she simply did not notice, and I am also not certain she would care either way. Her eyes, when she finally looks up from her phone and toward me, are bright and a little windswept, and she grins with her whole face the way she always does, the way that makes her look younger than she is and more alive than most people manage.

"Veyra! You're early!" She says this with such genuine surprise and delight that you would think she has not known me for years, has not heard Ruvan say this exact thing approximately ninety seconds ago, has not been told about my habits in exhausting detail by multiple people on multiple occasions. Zephy greets every familiar thing as though she is encountering it for the first time. I find this both bewildering and, privately, very wonderful.

"On time," Ruvan and I say simultaneously. He points at me. I point at him. Zephy looks between us with the specific expression of someone who has walked into the middle of a joke and decided the joke is excellent regardless.

The waiter comes. I order black coffee — different from the morning flat white, because the morning is for softness and the afternoon is for clarity — and a plate of pan de sal, because I have eaten nothing since the coffee shop and my body has begun to register this in the muted, bureaucratic way it always does when I forget to feed it on time. Not hunger, exactly. More like a polite memo from the departments below.

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