Zackito laughed. He waved the waiter over and ordered beers for me and for himself, and then as an afterthought, one for Laird. “Poor bastard’s going to need it,” he said.

I was mostly quiet that evening, standing on the edges of others’ conversations, laughing at the right time. I waited for someone to ask about my husband, as gossip like this crossed the Pacific speedily, a relief from the horror of Gumboc. My horror was a small, reasonable thing. Zackito chatted away, letting me know that I was frequently mentioned but no one knew the details of my separation, as I refused to provide any. He said, “Some people were surprised, but I wasn’t.” I found Zackito’s saying so strangely comforting. At around eleven, Zackito left with Inchoy, who was going back to Bibo’s. Although the party was just getting going, I decided it was a good time to leave. I crossed the room to let Laird know that I was heading home, but Laird had somehow insinuated himself into a political debate with the journalist clique and said that he would find his own way.

As I left, I could hear Laird interrogating the others, asking why martial law in Marawi would not spread throughout the country, wanting to know Gumboc’s reasons for removing a Supreme Court justice, which had been blowing up into a major scandal. I heard him pose question after question in the same uninflected American English, and the answers flew back, blossoming into arguments. But if anyone had a question for him, no one posed it, perhaps flattered that he had accepted their superiority in their own country, which was not a given when it came to Americans, Filipino background or not. Or perhaps because they thought that Laird had nothing of his own worth knowing.

I arrived home close to midnight, exhausted and a little tipsy. My reflection in the hall mirror revealed that my hair, sleek earlier, had started fanning out around my head in the humidity.

“Ting,” called Tita Rosa from the library. “Something came DHL.”

In the library, my aunt was seated at her desk before an ancient adding machine, working on her accounts. She punched some final numbers into a board and then turned the handle, creating a computational magic that had probably been devised in 1900.

“So how was your evening?” she asked.

“All in all, a success, I’d say. Laird made some friends.”

“He doesn’t smile,” she said.

“True,” I said. “He doesn’t let his guard down.”

My aunt nodded then picked up the DHL envelope that was resting on a stack of files and handed it to me. I took it from her and let it dangle by my side. “I’m exhausted, Tita. I’m going to bed.”

“Aren’t you going to open it?”