Page 34 of Signal No. Us

“You okay?” Robby asked Wednesday, watching Allan repaint the same section of sky for the third time, each version somehow worse than the last.

“I’m fine,” Allan said, too sharp, and immediately hated himself for it. “Sorry. Just tired.”

Robby studied him a beat longer than the answer deserved, but let it go, just like he’d learned to over the past few weeks, giving Allan room instead of crowding him, trusting, apparently, that whatever this was would surface on its own time.

Allan almost told him twice that week. Both times, the words got as far as his mouth and stalled there, blocked by the same old instinct that had sent him running to Manila in the first place: better to handle this alone, quietly, and present Robby with a finished decision than to admit, out loud, that some small, stubborn part of him was actually tempted.

That was the part that scared him most. Not the offer itself. The fact that some old, half-buried version of himself had heard Director, Regional Ops and felt, for one humiliating second, relieved, like proof, finally, that he hadn’t actually failed at the thing everyone had always expected of him. That leaving San Andres the first time hadn’t been a waste. That he could still, if he wanted, go back to being someone easy to explain at reunions.

He replied to Ms. Padilla on Thursday night, alone in his room, Oryo watching him with the specific suspicion dogs reserve for humans typing in the dark.

Thank you for reaching out. I’d like to discuss this further. Can we schedule something for next week?

He didn’t mention the mural. Didn’t mention Robby. Didn’t mention any of the ten thousand small, unglamorous, undeniable reasons he’d started, for the first time in a decade, to feel like a whole person again.

He hit send and felt, underneath the guilt, a small, treacherous flicker of the old adrenaline, that particular high of being wanted by something big and important and far away, the exact drug he’d spent a decade mistaking for purpose.

Outside his window, the mural sat half-finished on the cinema wall two streets over, two painted figures standing hand in hand under a storm neither of them was running from.

He didn’t go look at it that night. He told himself he was tired.

He knew, even as he told himself that, that it wasn’t true.

He almost told Cora on Friday. She caught him staring at his phone over breakfast, just like she caught everything, and asked, mild, “Something wrong?”—and the whole confession rose up in his throat, ready.

“Nothing,” he said instead. “Just work. I need to think it through carefully.”

She studied him a beat longer than the answer warranted, the old teacher’s instinct for a student holding something back, but let it go: the same grace she’d been extending him since coming home, trusting him to bring things to her on his own time.

He hated, a little, how easily he’d taken advantage of that grace to keep hiding.

That weekend, at the cinema, Jake caught him rereading the offer email for the fourth time, thumb hovering over Ms. Padilla’s number.

“Are you actually going to answer that?” Jake asked, glancing over his shoulder without much subtlety.

“It’s just an email, Jake.”

“You know, I spent four years selling ghost stories about the thing behind the chapel,” Jake said. “I know what it looks like when someone’s hiding something. You’re hiding something.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Everybody is,” Jake said, unfazed. “But Allan, I’ve known you since we were kids. My only question is who you’re actually going to tell before you even tell yourself what you’ve decided. Because if Robby isn’t the first person you tell, that already says something.”

Allan didn’t have an answer for that. Jake, mercifully, didn’t push for one, just clapped him once on the shoulder and went back to arguing with the engineer about ceiling joists again, leaving Allan alone with the phone, the email, and a certain, growing discomfort of being seen a little too clearly by someone who used to just tell ghost stories for a living.

CHAPTER 18

Allan had taken to answering emails on his phone behind the cinema’s crumbling ticket booth, where nobody would see the calendar invites stacking up, a “culture fit conversation,” a “compensation walkthrough,” each one scheduled with the brisk, efficient cheer of a company that had apparently decided its earlier mistake was worth correcting generously.

He hadn’t told anyone. Not Ver, not Cora, not Jake, and, the fact sitting worse in his stomach every day, not Robby.

It was Robby who finally cornered the truth, and there was no grand confrontation in it at all, just the small, mundane accumulation of things Allan had gotten sloppy about hiding.

“You have a call later?” Robby asked one evening, glancing at Allan’s phone screen where a calendar reminder had lit up mid-dinner: Final Interview, Executive Panel, Thu 2PM.

Allan closed the screen too fast. “Job interview,” he said. “Nothing’s certain yet, so⁠—”

“Interview for what, where?”