The mountain taught her how to breathe again.
In the mornings, mist pooled in the ravines and rose in pale ribbons through the pines. The cabins wore it like shawls. Emma woke before dawn now—no alarm, no pager, only the quiet nudging of air cold enough to make her lungs sting. She brewed ginger tea the way one of the aunts had shown her, sliced thin coins of root, added a thread of honey, and cupped the mug with both hands until her fingers stopped shaking.
After the regression, sleep no longer ambushed her; it arrived like a careful guest. The terrible weight that had pressed on her sternum—gone. What remained was a clean ache, the kind that doesn't crush, only reminds: You are alive. Keep going.
The aunts did not crowd her. They passed like weather—present, kind, uninsistent. When they offered counsel, it was never more than a sentence, set gently in her palm and left there to warm.
"Patahimikin mo ang puso," the eldest said one afternoon, sitting with Emma on the stone steps. ("Quiet your heart.")
"How?" Emma asked, the word small in the open air.
"Listen to the mountain," the aunt said, as if stating a fact too obvious for argument.
So Emma tried. She sat where the slope softened, where sunlight fell in coin-sized patches through the tall Benguet pines. She felt the slow, old pulse of the place, the subtle tides of breeze and shadow. When thoughts leapt like fish, she watched them leap and did not chase. When the ache for him rose, she did not deny it. She breathed around it the way you breathe around a stitch in your side until your body remembers its pace.
On the third morning, the aunt placed a length of woven abel in Emma's lap—green and gold threads nested like rivers at dusk. "Talinghaga ito." ("This is a metaphor.") She smiled at Emma's puzzled look. "For the thread between lives. For the way memory carries light even under water."
Emma ran her fingers over the cloth. "Is there really a thread?"
"Sometimes it feels like one." The aunt's eyes glinted, amused. "Sometimes it is only a way to speak about something larger. Either way, anak, it helps."
That evening, while the fog pressed its forehead to the windows and pine resin crackled in the hearth, Emma asked the question she'd kept folded under her tongue.
"Can I… reach him? Without calling. Without going."
The aunts didn't blink. "You can try."
"Is that—" She searched for words that wouldn't make her sound like a child asking to touch fire. "Is that allowed?"
Another of the sisters, the one who always smelled faintly of river stones, leaned in. "Huwag mong hilahin." ("Do not pull.") "Call softly. Offer a hand; do not drag. If he answers, it is his yes. If he does not, let him sleep."
Emma nodded. Her hands were steady on her cup. "Okay."
She waited until dawn.
The world had not yet remembered its colors—only blue, only gray, the pines cut out of the sky like paper. Emma sat cross-legged on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, the compass open on her knee. Its needle trembled, then steadied—not north but southeast, as if it had always known where her life would lead.
She closed her eyes.
Adrian.
She did not speak the name with her mouth. She let it rise in her chest the way fog rises—gentle, inevitable. She did not push. She did not demand. She placed the thought on the air like a small boat on a lake and watched it float.
Nothing.
No answer, no shimmer, no miraculous voice carrying on a wind. Only a bird startled from a branch somewhere uphill, the pinecones cracking in their own time.
She opened her eyes and almost laughed at herself. "Of course."
The next day, she tried again. Not in the stillness, but in the rain. Baguio rain is a soft animal—insistent, not violent, more conversation than assault. It tapped the railing, made tiny rivers of the steps. Emma sat with her palms open, letting water bead in the creases, and thought his name once more.
Adrian.
This time, something flickered—like stepping close to a hearth after coming in from the cold. Not heat exactly. Presence. A pressure along her skin, as if a hand had hovered near her hair but not touched. She startled, breath hitching. The pressure went with the breath.
She exhaled slowly, closed her eyes again, and offered the thought not as a flare but as a candle.
I'm here.
A feeling brushed back—thin as silk. It wasn't words. It wasn't even a voice. It was the real memory of how he smelled after rain, the clean edge of him, leaf and soap and night air.
She opened her eyes into rain and began to cry, not with the desolation that had terrified her in the first days, but with relief. Even if it was only her, even if the mountain and her mind were conspiring to comfort her, the comfort steadied.
On the fourth night, she dreamed.
Not of forests or hooves or flames. Of ordinary things: his hand finding hers while they waited for coffee, the way he frowned at receipts as if numbers were coy creatures, the particular tilt of his head when she teased him. She woke at once, heart galloping, and discovered she had sat up with her name half-formed on her lips.
No one answered. The room was as it had been—a low lamp, the woven cloth folded over the chair, the window a rectangle of slow-moving fog.
She lay back down and tried something the aunts had taught her: sending calm the way you send breath across hot soup. A soft push, a tender offering. She pictured the hut. She pictured him in human form, because it was the only way she knew how to imagine holding him. She sent the steadiness she had borrowed from the pines.
Sleep, mahal. (Beloved.)
In the morning she woke with the odd certainty that he had.
The aunt who smelled of river stones found her after breakfast, turning the compass over and over in her fingers.
"Your face is different," the aunt observed, the way a nurse might observe color returning to a patient's cheeks.
"I think…" Emma looked foolishly at the compass, as if it might approve. "I think he felt me. Or I felt him. Or we both… almost."
"May sinulid," the aunt said. ("There is a thread.")
"Is that real?" Emma's smile was crooked, skeptical even now.
"It is real enough to change your posture." The aunt reached and brushed a damp curl from Emma's temple. "Do not worry about naming it. Practice the care of it. Threads tangle when hands are impatient."
They set small tasks for her, as if she were learning a new instrument: sit with a fern and breathe until its fronds unclenched from the night's chill; place her palm on a stone and wait until she could feel its slow, ancient heat; send comfort to a skittish stray dog without calling it closer. Each act taught her the same lesson you learn when suturing a wound on trembling skin: steadiness first, then pressure, then release.
On the sixth day, she tried again with him.
Adrian. I'm not ready. But I'm not lost.
What slid back along the thread was a warmth heavy as summer, and with it a single syllable—maybe not even a syllable. A shape of sound that could have been her name broken by sleep.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes until the stars there settled. "Okay," she whispered into her palms. "Okay."
She dialed Mariel that afternoon. The mountain made phone calls sound like they were traveling across oceans in bottles, but her friend's voice arrived whole.
"Are you ready to go back?" Mariel asked without preface.
"Soon," Emma said, surprised to hear the certainty in her own voice. "I needed this time."
"You did," Mariel agreed. A kettle whistled faintly on her end—the familiar domesticity of it made Emma's throat tight. "Text me when you're on the road. Ingat." (Take care.)
"I will."
The aunts did not dramatize her leaving. They gave her provisions the way any lola would: boiled eggs wrapped in paper, small rice cakes sugared just enough, water in bottles that had once held vinegar. The eldest tucked a sprig of rosemary into Emma's jacket pocket "for remembering," and the river-stone aunt knotted the green-and-gold cloth around Emma's wrist like a quiet promise.
"Magpakatatag," one said at the steps. ("Be steadfast.")
"Magpakatotoo," another added. ("Be true.")
Emma hugged them each in turn. Their bodies felt like anyone's—bone and warmth and breath—but holding them was like leaning into a tree that has already weathered the storm you fear.
She packed without ceremony. The suitcase clicked shut. The compass slipped easily into the glove compartment, and then she thought better of it and set it on the dash where she could see the needle quiver when the car climbed. She left a note on the cabin table—Thank you for lending me your mountain—and locked the door.
Baguio's roads coiled down the slope like careful handwriting. Emma drove them with both windows cracked. The cold was a cousin to salt on a wound; it stung then healed. Pines thinned to scrubby brush, brush thinned to fields, fields to the familiar long stretches of highway that had always meant home and had never felt like such a choice until now.
At the last overlook before the descent, she pulled over, cut the engine, and let the wind talk. Baguio unfurled beneath her—roofs like scales, fog like breath. She put both hands on the wheel and, not trusting her mouth to keep from breaking, used the newer path.
Adrian.
The thread tightened. She did not know what that meant at a distance: whether he was in the forest, whether he was asleep, whether he had stepped into sunlight and thought of her clockwork predictability—how she takes her coffee at nine, how she hums when she's not aware of herself, how she refuses to text while driving because life deserves both hands.
I'm coming back to Bicol, she sent, not as an admission or a plea, but as a simple declaration. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Soon. Wait for me.
The answer wasn't a word. It was the clean drum of hooves on wet earth, rhythm pure as a metronome. It was the soft, impossible sensation of his palm against her cheek the night he'd kissed her at the hospital entrance: steady, certain, willing to be seen.
"Always," she said out loud because some things deserve air, and the mountain did not punish her for being foolish with tenderness.
A jeepney honked somewhere down the road. Emma laughed, a sound that felt like bones beginning to knit right. She started the engine.
South, the compass needle said without needing to speak. Southeast, toward fields that rolled green into coconut, toward a lane with a guava tree and a roof that had once needed patching and now simply needed hands that wouldn't leave.
She drove.
The road gathered under her tires, thread made asphalt, and the mountain receded with the kind of grace only old things possess. In the rearview, mist swallowed the last of the cabins. Ahead, a brighter heat lifted off the highway, and beyond that, the idea of a forest that was not there to trap her anymore, but to hold her chosen life.
She kept her promise to the aunts—steadfast, true—by doing the ordinary well: stopping for gas even though she could have made it to the next town, answering Mariel's text with a photo of the road and the words On my way, buying two extra bottles of water so she wouldn't have to scold herself later for being careless. Each small act was a stitch in a seam she'd ripped and was now sewing back with both hands.
At noon, she pulled into a roadside eatery, the kind with plastic chairs and a tarp roof rattling in the wind. She ate pancit without flinching at the memory of anniversary noodles spilled on a hut floor. Grief had fingerprints everywhere; she decided to hold the hand anyway.
Back in the car, she rested her palm on the compass. The needle held its line as if it knew she would falter if it wavered.
"Salamat," she told it, because gratitude—even to metal—was real medicine. (Thank you.)
Afternoon burned itself down. The sky bruised toward violet. Billboards grew familiar, then forgettable. When the boundary marker finally rose like a punctuation mark—CAMARINES NORTE—Emma rolled her shoulders and exhaled, a sound like a blessing.
She didn't drive to the forest. Not yet. She didn't dial his number; she wouldn't risk her resolve on a voice she might not survive. She pointed the car toward Panganiban, toward the small house that had held her grandmother's dresses and now held the life she owed honesty.
There would be a friend to see first, a woman with a dry wit and a mouth that never lied. There would be work to consider, apologies to make where they were owed, boundaries to set where they would be tested. There would be a man to face, not as a myth or a monster, but as the same person who buys hash browns at a drive-thru and kisses her at doorways like the world is simple.
Dusk gathered itself into edges. The road narrowed the way a thread narrows between finger and needle before it passes through.
"Huwag mong hilahin," she reminded herself. ("Do not pull.")
She would not go to the forest and drag him into a scene. She would not demand promises she could not keep. She would call softly. Offer a hand. Let him answer or sleep.
Even so, when the first dark line of trees appeared, something lifted in her chest like a bird startled into the right direction.
Soon, she sent along the quiet inside her that was no longer empty. Soon, mahal. I will meet you where we began: as ourselves.
The lane opened. The guava tree leaned as if it had waited this particular hour all day. Emma turned in and parked and sat with the engine ticking cool, a woman who had run, a woman who had learned to stop running, a woman who was about to be brave again.
She closed the compass, slipped it into her pocket, and went inside to sleep in the house that remembered her better than she remembered herself.
Tomorrow would be for phone calls and coffee and the first necessary smiles. The forest could wait one more dawn.
She could feel it at the edge of her thoughts anyway—the steady drum that was not a word, the answer that had always been there, the thread between lives humming like a held note.
It would be enough, for now.