“I’ve been wondering about that too,” I said. So far Laird had managed to show up at my cousin’s daughter’s baptism, a family outing to Magnolia for ice cream, and even Wednesday Mass. But despite Laird’s showing up at everything, I didn’t feel that I knew him any better than the first time we’d met. “Why was he at the blessing of Carmi’s new restaurant?” I asked. “I wasn’t even sure why I was there.” Tita Dom laughed. “I got stuck in this weird conversation with him about morality versus truth and the shaping of public opinion.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Well, it wasn’t. We couldn’t agree on what ‘public’ was. I could have come up with something, but I just wanted him to stop talking to me, so I played stupid. And then he went on and on about the state of the LRT and how traffic affects the poor.”

“Traffic affects everyone,” said Tita Dom.

“Tita Rosa needs to stop inviting him to everything.” My tita Dom nodded in agreement. What else did I know about Laird? “Did you know he studied martial law under Batac?”

“Yes,” she said. “I googled him. That’s in his bio.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Not really. There’s a paper of his online, all about the October Revolution.”

“The Russian October Revolution?”

“Is there another?”

I shrugged. “Well, that explains a lot.”

“It does?”

“It might. He’s studying Manila society. Maybe he wants to write about us, you know, because we’re relics of a feudal society, like the Romanovs.”

“He thinks we’re the Romanovs?” she said. She had moved on from the sashimi and was now eyeing the tempura, deciding whether it was friend or foe. “So Jim is Nicholas and Cha Cha is Alexandra?”

“And Tito Ben is Rasputin.”

“No,” said my aunt. “Rosa is Rasputin. We should all say no to her, and we can’t. And you, Ting, are Anastasia.”

“Why Anastasia?”

“Because you show up all over the place, surprising people.”

“When I should really be dead.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, spearing shrimp and waving it at me sagely. “But you could take better care of yourself.”

“What did Rikki have to say about Laird?”

“Just that he asked a lot of questions. He was asking Rikki about Marawi, if he knew anyone down there.”

“Marawi? What does Rikki know about Marawi?”

“Just what everyone knows. The city was destroyed. And there are Muslims and they kidnap tourists and we don’t go down there. It was a short conversation.” She took a bite of the shrimp and chewed thoughtfully. “What is going on with you and Chet Rey?”

“Nothing.” I had moved on from the bagnet to the crispy pata: the second pork course. “He moved out on C. G. and is living in this apartment in Makati.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”