The kitchen smells like ginger. Mikha stands at the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand, watching the pot come to a low boil, the chicken pieces turning pale in the broth. She had to look up the recipe twice this morning, then a third time this time with her phone propped against the rice cooker, and she still isn't sure she got the malunggay right — she put it in too early, maybe, or too late. The green leaves float on top now, soft and dark. She tastes it from the spoon. Too much fish sauce. She adds water. Tastes again. Not enough fish sauce. She stares at the pot like it insulted her.

She cooks it anyway. All of it. She sets the table then sits down and eats alone. The chair across from her stays empty. Aiah's office door has been shut since Aiah went there, and the house has that specific quiet it gets when someone is working behind a closed door and everyone else is pretending not to exist. Mikha chews slowly. The tinola is fine. Not as good as Carmen's. Not as good as Aiah's, either, if she's being honest, and she is being honest, because there's no one here to lie to. She eats half a bowl and pushes the rest around with her spoon until the broth goes cold.

Then she fixes the tray. Best bowl. The good spoon, the one with the thin handle. She ladles the broth carefully so it doesn't slosh, arranges the chicken on top, adds a second small bowl of rice, adds a glass of cold water, puts the sauce dish of patis with calamansi that Aiah likes, and carries the whole thing to the office room. She knocks once with her elbow. No answer. She balances the tray on one arm and opens the door anyway.

Aiah is at her desk with her reading glasses on, three stacks of paper fanned out in front of her, her pen moving. She doesn't look up. Mikha has seen her like this before — the gala weeks, the late nights — but this is different. This is the same posture with the door closed on purpose.

"Lunch," Mikha says.

Nothing.

Mikha sets the tray down on the corner of the desk, slow, careful, moving the papers aside an inch to make room. The tray settles with a small click against the wood. Aiah's pen keeps moving. Mikha stands there for a second, hands at her sides, watching the side of Aiah's face — the glasses, the jaw, the small muscle working at the corner of it.

She leans down and presses her lips to Aiah's temple. It's quick. It's the same spot she's kissed for months, the spot just above the eyebrow, and Aiah's pen doesn't stop.

"I love you," Mikha says, quiet, into her hair.

She straightens up and walks out. She closes the door behind her the way she found it — shut, but not slammed — and stands in there for a moment with her hand still on the knob, breathing through her nose. Then she goes to bedroom, takes a shower that's too hot, and gets dressed. She leaves the house without telling Aiah where she's going.

The driveway is already baking by the time she goes out. She doesn't know if Aiah heard the engine. She doesn't check the window.

The drive to the Arceta mansion takes forty minutes and she spends most of it rehearsing nothing, because there's nothing to rehearse. She's not going to explain. She's not going to defend herself. She's not going to stand in that living room and tell Mr. Lim that the man he invited to his foundation's gala said something about his daughter's ass, and that Mikha hit him for it, and that she'd hit him again. That's not an apology. That's a story that makes her look right. She doesn't want to look right. She wants to say sorry and leave.

The guard at the gate recognizes the car. Of course he does. Mikha's name is on the visitor log for every family dinner for the past eight months. He waves her through with a smile she doesn't earn.

Carmen opens the door before Mikha reaches it. She's in a house dress, hair pinned up, and she smells like whatever she was cooking — garlic, something fried — and she looks at Mikha the way she always does, with that soft appraising warmth that Mikha has never figured out how to stand under.

"Mikha," she says. "Come in, anak. Have you eaten?"

"I'm okay, Tita."

"You're not okay, you're thin." Carmen steps aside. "Come in."

Eduardo is in the living room with the newspaper folded on his knee and his reading glasses pushed up on his head. He stands when he sees her. He does that every time, stands up like she's someone important, and it's never stopped making Mikha's chest feel tight. His handshake is warm and unhurried.

"Mikha." He looks at her face — the split knuckles she's kept in her pocket, the cheekbone, where the bruise is still evident. "Sit down."

"I won't stay long, Tito." She stays standing. "I came to say sorry."

Carmen pauses with her hand on the back of a chair. Eduardo doesn't move.

"For the gala," Mikha says. "For what happened. For the scene, and for embarrassing the foundation and this family in front of everyone who matters to you." She keeps her voice level. She keeps her eyes on Eduardo's, because she owes him that much. "It was my fault. All of it. I'm sorry."

Eduardo is quiet for a second. Then he sighs, and it's not an angry sigh — it's the long tired one of a man who has spent his whole life absorbing other people's messes — and he sits back down and gestures at the couch.

"Sit," he says again, gentler. "You drove all the way here to say that standing up?"

Mikha sits. Her hands want to do something, so she folds them.

"You think I don't know who Jeremy Gringo is," Eduardo says. "You think I invited him because I like him. I invited him because his mother is on the board of the hospital we fund and his father controls two of our shipping lines. That's the whole reason. He's a pig and everyone in that room knows it." He takes his glasses off his head and sets them on the newspaper. "Whatever he said to you — and I can guess the shape of it, because men like that only have one shape — you didn't do anything I wouldn't have wanted to do at your age. You just did it where people could see."

Mikha's throat does something she doesn't allow it to do in front of people. She looks at the carpet.

"But you put Aiah in a hard place," Eduardo goes on, and his voice stays kind, which is somehow worse. "She built that night for a year. She had to stand at the front of it and watch it come apart. That's the part you're apologizing for, and that's the part I accept. On her behalf, until she can accept it herself."

"Yes, Tito."

Carmen comes back with a glass of water and sets it in front of Mikha and sits down beside her husband, and she doesn't say anything, but she reaches over and pats Mikha's knee once, twice, and leaves her hand there for a second. Mikha looks at the hand. She doesn't move away from it.

"There's one more thing," Mikha says, when she trusts her voice. "The guest list from that night. The full one. Could I have a copy?"

Eduardo frowns. "The guest list?"

"The sponsors, the partners, the tables. Whoever was in that room. If there's a list, I'd like it."

He studies her for a moment. He's a businessman; he knows a question with a purpose behind it. But he doesn't ask what the purpose is. He gets up, goes to the study, and comes back with a folder — thick, tabbed, the foundation's crest on the cover — and hands it to her.

"The sponsors are at the front," he says. "Renato Villanueva, the Cruzes, the Tans, the Gringos. The rest is alphabetical."

"Thank you."

"Mikha." He says it like a question. "What are you planning?"

"Nothing bad." She tucks the folder under her arm. "I just want to fix what I broke."

Carmen walks her to the door. At the threshold she touches Mikha's elbow and says, "Come for dinner next Sunday. Bring Aiah. Whatever's going on between the two of you, you can eat here while it's going on."

"I'll ask her po."

"You'll come."

Mikha almost smiles. "I'll come."

She gets in the car and sits there for a minute before she starts the engine, the folder on the passenger seat, her hands on the wheel. It's not that they forgave her. It's that they didn't even make her work for it. They just — opened the door and fed her and told her she was thin. Her own parents would have made her sit through an hour of what she'd cost them. Hubert would have asked for the numbers first. And the tightness in her chest right now isn't shame, it's something closer to grief, and she doesn't have anything to do for it, so she puts the car in reverse and drives.

She doesn't go to her parents. She thinks about it for exactly one red light. She can picture the driveway, the house, Hazel's face, Hubert's office. She can picture herself standing in that doorway saying sorry and meaning it, and she can picture the way Hubert would receive it — not as an apology, as a concession, as proof he still has a grip on her. She can't face them yet. Maybe not for a while. She turns left instead of right and heads back into the city.

The next day she leaves after lunch again. She tells Aiah she loves her first — same as yesterday, same as she will every day for the days she doesn't know, standing at the door of whatever room Aiah is in, saying it to the back of her head or the side of her face or the edge of a page — and then she goes.

The first meeting is with Renato Villanueva, in the lobby of his building, because he won't give her a table. He's a big man with a bigger watch and he looks at her the way men like him look at her, like she's a headline that walked in. She doesn't sit down. She says what she came to say: that she's sorry for the disruption at the gala, that it was her fault, that the foundation didn't deserve it and neither did its guests, and that she'll be making a personal donation to cover the broken table and the cleanup and whatever else the venue charged. Villanueva laughs at first. Then he stops laughing, because she isn't joking, and because she's still standing there with her hands folded, waiting for him to finish so she can leave.

"You're the Lim girl," he says. "The one the papers love."

"I'm Aiah's wife," Mikha says. "That's the part that matters here."

He looks at her for a long second. Then he nods, once, and says, "Tell Eduardo his daughter married better than he thinks."

She says thank you and leaves before he can say anything else.

The Cruz meeting is worse. Mrs. Cruz keeps her waiting twenty minutes and then spends ten of them explaining, in detail, how the gala's photographs are now attached to a brawl in every search result, and how her brand's name is in those photographs. Mikha lets her finish. Then she apologizes, offers the same donation, and asks what else would help. Mrs. Cruz blinks. Nobody has ever asked her that. She says she'll think about it, which is more than Mikha expected.

The Tans are easy. The Gringos are not. She doesn't meet Jeremy — she meets his mother, in a café, and the woman spends the whole hour being gracious in a way that has teeth in it, and Mikha sits through it because she owes it. She doesn't mention the son. The mother doesn't either. They both know.

Every day is like this. She drives from office to office, from lobby to lobby, from café to restaurant, and she says the same thing in a different room, and by the end of the first week her voice has gone flat from repetition and her suits need dry cleaning and she has stopped checking her phone between appointments because Aiah doesn't text her. She comes home at seven, eight, nine. She stops at whatever place looks good on the way — a bakery in Makati, a Chinese place in BGC, a stall selling puto bumbong near the house that she has to circle the block twice to find — and she carries the bag inside and leaves it on whichever surface Aiah is near. The desk, if the office door is open. The side table, if Aiah is reading in the living room. The low table, if she's on the bedroom couch with the TV on.

She doesn't say anything when she puts it down. She doesn't say anything after. She just sets the bag where it can be seen, and then she goes and takes off her jacket and sits somewhere else in the house, waits for the sound of the bag being opened, and something in her chest lets go by a fraction of an inch.

Aiah never asks where she's been. Mikha never tells her. It's the only conversation they have some nights — the bag, the silence, the back of Aiah's head — and Mikha has decided that if this is the version of them she gets for now, she'll take it. It's more than she had at the gala. It's more than she deserves, probably.

At night, after Aiah's breathing goes slow, Mikha gets up. She pads out to the living area in the dark, opens her laptop on the low table, and starts on the list. The guest list from the folder Eduardo gave her, cross-referenced with the foundation's program, cross-referenced with the seating chart. She finds the emails the way she finds everything — by not stopping until she has them — and then she writes the same letter, tailored by hand, over and over. I'm Mikha Lim, Aiah Arceta-Lim's wife. I was responsible for the disruption at the Arceta Foundation gala on Saturday. I want to apologize to you personally for the disturbance and for any harm it caused your evening, your brand, or your name. The fault was entirely mine. If there is anything I can do to make it right, please tell me. She reads each one before she sends it. Some nights she sends six. Some nights she sends twenty. Some replies come back fast and cold. Some come back kind. Most don't come back at all. She doesn't care. She reads them all, answers the ones that want answers, and closes the laptop, and goes back to bed.

Two weeks of this. Her knuckles heal. The bruise on her cheekbone fades to nothing. She drinks no beer, no whiskey, nothing, not once — she wants to be clear-headed for every one of these conversations, and anyway she doesn't want to walk into the bedroom smelling like the thing Aiah is angry about.

By Friday the checklist is done. Every sponsor met in person. Every guest emailed. She closes the folder on the passenger seat and drives home from the last meeting — a minor partner, a shipping man in Pasay who shook her hand at the end and said his wife had liked Aiah's speech — and on the way she stops at a stall near the corner and buys bibingka, two of them, still warm through the paper, the butter and the salted egg making the whole car smell like a festive.

She finds Aiah in the bedroom, on the couch, watching something on the TV — American actors, a city, a lot of talking — and she sets the paper bag on the low table in front of her. She leans down and kisses Aiah's temple, the same spot, and says, "I love you," and it comes out quieter than she meant, the way it has for fourteen days.

Aiah doesn't answer. Mikha doesn't wait for it. She walks out, closes the door behind her, and drops onto the living room couch, her head back, her eyes closed. She's tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. She doesn't hear the paper bag open, but she doesn't hear it not open either. She just sits there.

Then the front door bangs open.

Mikha's eyes snap open. Jhoanna comes in first with a box of pizza balanced on one hand and a paper bag of chicken wings in the other, and Colet is right behind her carrying a box of beer on her shoulder like it's a rifle, and neither of them knocks, because the door isn't locked. Mikha forgot. Two weeks of coming home at nine and locking up behind herself and tonight she forgot, and now her best friends are in her living room, and Jhoanna is already talking.

"Before you say anything," Jhoanna says, setting the pizza down on the coffee table, "we brought food. That's the whole apology."

"I didn't invite you."

"You never invite us anywhere. That's why we have to break in." Colet sets the beer down and starts moving Mikha's jacket off the arm of the couch, folding it, setting it on the back. "You look terrible."

"Thanks."

"I mean it in a loving way."

Jhoanna flops onto the couch next to Mikha and starts opening the pizza box. "We heard things," she says. "From people. Apparently you've been making the rounds. Renato Villanueva told somebody who told somebody who told my mother, and my mother called me to ask if you'd joined a church."

Mikha doesn't answer. She's watching the bedroom door.

It opens. Aiah steps out in her house clothes — the soft gray ones, hair down — and she's heading for the kitchen, a glass in her hand, and she stops when she sees the living room. Jhoanna and Colet both straighten up like they got caught doing something.

"Hi, Aiah," Jhoanna says, cheerful, too cheerful. "We brought pizza. And wings. And beer. We're a whole restaurant."

"Hi," Aiah says. It's not cold, exactly. It's just short. She lifts the glass a little, a small wave, and keeps walking to the kitchen, and Mikha watches her go and watches her come back, and Aiah doesn't look at Mikha either time. She disappears into the bedroom and the door clicks shut.

Colet pulls three bottles out of the box and sets them on the table. She looks at Mikha. "You haven't been drinking."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I've been driving."

Colet snorts, but she doesn't push. Jhoanna pushes. "Mikha. It's Friday. You've spent two weeks apologizing to half of Metro Manila on your own, which, by the way, is the most insane thing I've ever heard anyone do, and I once watched you eat a whole raw chili on a dare. You're allowed one beer."

Mikha looks at the bottle. Then at the bedroom door. She stands up.

"Where are you going?" Jhoanna says.

"One second."

She walks to the bedroom and lets herself in. Aiah is back on the couch with the TV on and the bibingka in her lap, a piece torn off in her hand, and she looks up when the door opens. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at Mikha, and her eyes are the same as they've been for two weeks — not angry anymore, not quite, but not open either, and Mikha can't read what's behind them and it makes her want to look at the floor.

She walks to the side of the couch and stands there, and she can feel her own face getting warm before she even opens her mouth.

"Colet brought beer," she says. "I didn't ask her to. She just — showed up. With beer." She's looking at the wall. Then the corner of the rug. Then a point somewhere past Aiah's shoulder. "Can I drink tonight?"

Aiah laughs. It's soft, and small, and it's the first sound that Mikha has heard from her in two weeks, and Mikha's eyes jerk back to her face before she can stop them. Aiah is smiling — not much, just at the corner of her mouth — and she lifts her hand and curls two fingers, a small come-here.

Mikha leans down. Their faces are a few inches apart. Aiah reaches up and touches her cheek, her thumb tracing the spot where the bruise used to be, and Mikha forgets how to breathe.

"Make sure you shower before bed," Aiah says, quiet, right against her ear. "I'm not sleeping next to someone who reeks of alcohol." Then she kisses Mikha's cheek — one, quick, warm — and leans back and tears another piece off the bibingka. "This is good, by the way." And she goes back to her show, chewing, her eyes on the screen, like she didn't just do that.

Mikha straightens up. Her face is on fire. She can feel it, the whole thing, from her jaw to her ears, and she knows exactly what she looks like and she can't do anything about it. She walks out of the bedroom and closes the door behind her.

When she gets back to the living room, Jhoanna takes one look at her and starts howling.

"Oh my god," Jhoanna says. "Oh my god. Colet. Colet, look at her."

"I'm looking," Colet says, deadpan, opening her beer. "She's pink."

"She's not pink, she's radioactive. What did Aiah do, hand you a flower?"

"Shut up." Mikha sits down and grabs a beer because if she's going to be humiliated she's going to do it with a drink in her hand. "Shut up, both of you."

Jhoanna is still laughing, but she stops when she sees Mikha twist the cap off and take a long pull. She raises her own bottle. "There she is," she says, softer. "You earned it."

Colet clinks her bottle against Mikha's and doesn't say anything, which from Colet is basically a speech. They eat the pizza. They eat the wings. Jhoanna tells a story about a source at the newsroom who got caught sleeping with the competition's editor and tries to do the voices, badly, and Colet corrects her facts, and Mikha laughs — actually laughs, once, loud enough that she surprises herself — and for an hour the living room sounds like it used to, before any of this, back when the three of them were just three idiots in a club room with nothing to lose.

By the time they leave, Mikha is warm and loose and a little bit past tipsy. Colet takes the empty bottles out to the bin on her way and Jhoanna hugs her at the door and says, into her ear, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it," and then they're gone and the house is quiet again.

Mikha locks the door behind them this time. Then she showers — long, hot, scrubbing the smell of beer and pizza out of her hair — and comes to bed in a t-shirt and shorts with her hair still damp, and Aiah is already under the covers with the TV still on, some late-night talk show, the volume low.

Mikha gets in on her side. She lies on her back for a second, then turns onto her side, facing Aiah, and the strip of empty mattress between them is narrower than it's been in two weeks. An inch, maybe. Maybe less. She doesn't close it.

"I'm sorry," she mutters.

Aiah turns her head. She looks at Mikha for a long second without saying anything. Then she smiles, small and real. She moves forward and puts her arms around Mikha's waist and tucks her face into Mikha's neck.

Mikha freezes. Her whole body goes stiff, arms at her sides, heart going hard against her ribs, because she hasn't been this close to Aiah in two weeks and she doesn't know if she's allowed to want it. Then Aiah nuzzles into her neck, that small warm pressure, and something in Mikha gives way, and she brings her arms up and folds them around Aiah's back and holds her, tight, her chin resting on top of Aiah's head.

"I love you," Aiah whispers into her neck.

Mikha's eyes burn. She blinks fast, hard, and her voice comes out rough. "I love you." She swallows. "You haven't said it back in two weeks."

Aiah pulls back just enough to look up at her, her chin on Mikha's chest, and her eyes are doing that thing they do when she's about to say something that's going to land. "I have," she says. "Every time. You're just already out the door."

Mikha stares at her. Then she laughs — a short breath of a laugh, surprised out of her — and she reaches up and takes Aiah's jaw in her hand, her thumb along the line of it, and she leans in and kisses her. Soft. Slow. The kind of kiss that isn't going anywhere, that just wants to be a kiss. Aiah kisses her back, and for a few seconds there's nothing in the room but the low murmur of the TV and the two of them breathing.

Aiah pulls back first, her hand flat on Mikha's chest, and looks at her. "Where have you been going?"

Mikha's thumb moves once along her jaw. "Apologizing to people," she says.

"To who?"

"People." Mikha doesn't elaborate. She can see Aiah deciding whether to push, and she can see her decide not to, not tonight, and something in Mikha's chest aches with gratitude for it. She leans in and kisses her again — softer this time, slower, her hand sliding back into Aiah's hair — and Aiah kisses her back, and neither of them says anything else about it.

When they finally settle, Aiah turns over and Mikha moves behind her without being asked, her arm over Aiah's waist, her face in Aiah's hair, and the strip of empty mattress is gone. The TV is still on. Neither of them reaches for the remote. Mikha listens to Aiah's breathing go slow and even, feels the small weight of her settle against her chest, and stays awake a little longer than she needs to — just to be here, just to have this, just in case.

The talk show host laughs at his own joke. Mikha closes her eyes.