Chapter 75

Luz.

Crisanto smiles sadly at Jomari.

“Congratulations. Luz is a great woman. I’m sorry for disturbing your peace. I wish you all the best for your future together.”

“No,” Jomari says. “I will not take your fiancée from you.”

Luz looks from one to the other in confusion. Are they really giving her away to each other as if she were a gift wrapped in a bow? Shouldn’t it be her choice to decide which of the two men she wants to be with?

Jomari steps forward and takes Crisanto’s hand in his.

“I know she loved you and I’m sure she can love you again. She’s had a rough time recently. Please, take care of her,” Jomari says, shaking Crisanto’s hand.

Then he turns to Luz. His eyes are shiny.

“Good luck with your life,” he says, his voice breaking.

He kisses her forehead and walks away.

Luz watches him walk away in disbelief. How could he give her away so easily? In movies, when two men want the same woman, they fight each other to the death. They don’t exchange pleasantries and race each other in generosity. Maybe Jomari and Crisanto don’t feel she’s worth fighting for?

Luz’s heart shrivels a little. If Crisanto has kept himself hidden away for all these years, letting her believe that he was dead, she can’t expect him to fight for her. But she had hoped for something more from Jomari. He hasn’t put up even the smallest fight.

And now Crisanto is looking at Luz, possibly expecting her to leap at his neck, squealing with happiness, and cover him with kisses.

But Luz doesn’t feel like that. She has spent many years trying to forget him, and she has succeeded.

She studies him. He looks familiar but also a stranger. She will never see the things he’s seen or live through what he’s lived through. He will never know about her life in these years they’ve been apart—and grown apart. It feels so awkward to stand in front of each other again. So awkward that neither of them has touched the other—not even for a brief hug or a kiss on the cheek.

“Are you well?” she asks him to break the silence.

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you. You?”

“I’m well too.”

It strikes Luz that these are just the pleasantries that any strangers would exchange.

“Have you got somewhere to stay? There’s an empty room in the staff’s quarters and I’m sure it would be fine for you to stay there a night or two,” Luz offers, because it’s easier to fix the immediate practical issues rather than the issue of their future.

“It’s okay. I booked somewhere to stay just in case I found you with someone else. Which is just what has happened.”

Luz snorts.

“Only, my boyfriend has just walked out.”

“I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about bursting into your life and turning it upside down,” Crisanto says. “You didn’t want him to return you to me, did you?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to come back anymore. God knows how much I cried for you.”

“I know. My parents have told me. I’m very sorry. There was no way for me to let you know that I was alive. I had no way to communicate with anyone.”

“Crisanto, please, don’t misunderstand me: none of what happened is your fault. You were the victim, not the perpetrator.”

“You could say that, but over these years I’ve learned that nothing is ever so clear cut. Yes, I was the victim of a kidnapping, but the kidnappers themselves were victims of other people’s greed and cruelty. And this is why there’s something I need to explain.”

They’re still standing in front of the gate with the night guard watching them and watching over Luz.

“We should go inside,” Luz suggests.

She waves at the guard who lifts the gate’s barrier for them. They amble up the drive towards the house, surrounded by the night air heavy with the scent of jasmine and the insistent drone of the cicadas.

“The reason I’ve burst into your life without a warning”—Crisanto says as soon as they are out of earshot of the guard—“is that I wanted to see your life as it was, without you changing anything because of me.”

“Why?”

He looks at an indefinite point in the distance.

“Because I’m not the same man you got engaged to. I’ve seen things that I can’t unsee and that have changed me.”

He stops and turns to face her.

“For a long time, I had no plans for the future because I didn’t think there was a future for me. But now that I have escaped and I can make plans again...I’m not sure I can share my future with you.”

Luz can’t believe this. Is she being dumped by two men on one night? Is that even possible?

“The pirates were cruel to us, I won’t deny it, but I’ve forgiven them because they were desperate people. They were seeing their families starve and their villages destroyed.”

Crisanto takes her hands into his.

“After what I’ve seen, I can’t go back to my old life and pretend that nothing has happened. I want to help desperate people like them. I haven’t yet decided how to do it—working for a humanitarian organization, for a church or on my own—but I know that I must do something.”

Lus nods in understanding.

“I also know that it’s going to be a dangerous life, without a fixed home or any security. I cannot have a wife and a family.”

“I understand. So you haven’t come here to reclaim me as your fiancée.”

“No. I came to see if you had another man and if I was still bound to you. If I found that you had someone else, I would consider myself free. But if I found you on your own and you still wished to marry me, I would have gone ahead with our wedding.”

“But now your plan has been foiled by Jomari giving me up,” Luz says.

“No. I’m sure that Jomari will come back to you in a heartbeat, if you ask him to. But if you still wish to marry me, I will do it. The choice is yours.”

Not it’s not, Luz thinks. She would never marry a man who was doing it out of duty. But it’s fine by her because she doesn’t want to marry Crisanto anymore. The flame she worked so hard to extinguish, all those years ago, is not firing up again. That boat has passed. She had just got onto a new one—Jomari’s—and she wanted to go back there.

“You’ve come to have my blessing on your future without me,” she says.

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“You have it,” she says.

“No hard feelings?”

“None at all.”

She hugs him.

“By the way, have I told you that I’m glad you’re alive?” she asks.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I am. And I’m sure that lots of other people—the ones you will help in the future—will be glad of that too.”

He tightens the hug.

“You’re a great woman, Luz. You’ve always been. Now go and get your man before he spends a sleepless night in sadness.”