I considered. I knew he would give me time to respond because he wanted the truth, but I wasn’t sure how to present that. In reality, I was having difficulty believing that I had actually been a wife. It was my Manila mindset. It was as if, as the time theorists proposed, the ordering of things only happened in one’s consciousness and without this ordering, the matter of life floated around as event signatures simultaneously. From where I sat, in this GrabCar with the street flashing by, it seemed possible that I never had married my husband. He could just have been one destiny, one option that, if I chose to ignore it, would simply go away. Maybe my husband was in the future or in some other present and not in the past. Maybe I could decide to not have been married.

“Well?” Inchoy asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“When you say that,” Inchoy said, “it usually means that you don’t understand.”

He began to grab sheaves of paper from the shopping bag, dumping them on the seat between us. “You can correct the quizzes,” he said, handing me a stack. “This one has no mistakes.” He passed me a quiz that was already graded.

There were ten questions on the quiz and I read through the responses. 1. Hobbes, 2. Free Will, 3. Head of State, 4. First Cause, 5. The Social Contract, 6. The Phenomenon of Man, 7. Spinoza, 8. Hegelian Dialectic, 9. Critique of Pure Reason, 10. The City of God. Uncertain of the questions but sure of the answers, I took the red pen and started marking.

By the time we reached Bibo’s apartment, it was almost nine. We had stopped on the way to buy some crispy pata, and Bibo was making sinigang and would have rice. Bibo’s apartment was right above the sari sari store, which was, at this hour, manned by Chok-Chok, one of Bibo’s friends. We stood in the dark, deeply hot stairwell and Inchoy knocked. The sound of three locks being opened quickly followed.

Bibo wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she had strong cheekbones and a small, well-formed mouth. Her long, straight hair was down around her shoulders despite the heat. She smiled, and the smile settled in her eyes.

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome, welcome.”

The local term for people like Bibo was binabae, or “womanly.” There was also the broader term bakla, which just meant gay. Regardless, gender here was simplified by siya, Tagalog’s gender-neutral third-person pronoun.