Top Gun had picked me up from my aunt’s house and we were now heading to Ermita to pick Chet up from the Manila Hotel. For once, I had overestimated the traffic and as we made the final stretch of Roxas Boulevard, I realized Top Gun and I would be a half hour early. I did not know who Chet was meeting nor why they were meeting, and this seemed an odd choice of venue. Old Manila was far from Makati, which had its own watering holes. I texted Chet to let him know that we’d arrived, on the off chance that he was wrapping things up.

He responded:

See you Tap Room. Order me V&T.

I hadn’t been in the Manila Hotel in years. The Tap Room was much as I’d remembered it, all wood paneling and expensive whiskey. When we dated, Chet and I had often started our evenings here and it did seem a room that was frozen in time, with the same American businessmen and Australian development consultants perched on the stools, deciding the future of the Philippines, although now there were more Koreans and Chinese filling the seats. I chose to sit in a lounge chair and ordered two vodka tonics, Ketel One, although in my youth I’d been partial to Absolut.

Chet appeared when I was halfway through my drink. His had sweated on the table, but with the chill of the air-conditioning, the ice cubes were mostly intact. Chet sat opposite me on the red velvet chair. He looked around the room and said, “You are the most beautiful woman here.”

I took a quick glance at the other tables, noting that the ratio of women to men was about five to one. The odds were in my favor. “Did your meeting go well?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. He was unwilling to say more. “It’s like old times.”

“These are times, and we are old,” I responded. This was one of few occasions we’d been in public together, maybe since the movie theater at Robinsons, which seemed like an eon ago. He took a slug from the drink and smiled. Chet was not a big drinker, never had been, although that seemed influenced more by his workaholic habits than by some tendency toward abstinence. We began to chat about a bathroom that was being renovated in the apartment—he had yet to select the tile for the floor—and then we had another drink, because sitting and doing so seemed celebratory, although we had nothing much to celebrate. And then it occurred to me that this drink with Chet was not accidental, as nothing in his life really was. He was setting the scene for a conversation, and I began to wait to see what exactly that conversation would be.

There was a moment of silence, which felt like an intentional lapse as Chet shifted gears. He said, “Have you heard from your husband?”