Rafi Al-Malik woke to Manila afternoon light slanting across a rented sofa, the kind of light that made dust look like patient confetti. For a long second he didn't move. Stillness was part of the ritual after travel: name the place, count the breaths, find the direction of prayer without opening an app.
Parañaque. Field Residences. Window faces west. Qibla's there.
He sat up and the sampaguita garland on the coffee table answered with a small knock against the wood. He'd looped it there without thinking, the way people hung luck on doorknobs. Beside it lay a florist's card with a phone number on the back and the memory of a woman running elegant in a baby-pink dress.
He washed and spread the prayer mat. Asr pulled the afternoon into order—hands, forehead, heart bowing to what did not sway with airlines or schedules or anyone's idea of what a prince should be. Gratitude for safe arrivals. Patience for whatever came next. Clarity to choose less noise and more truth.
After, he opened the fridge. Someone from the staff had done what they always did: left a box of rice, grilled chicken, a small container of atchara, fruit, water. He ate standing up—first water, then a few slow bites—then switched on the fan and called home.
"Amma," he said when his mother's voice came through, rich with all the places she'd lived. "I have arrived. I prayed. I ate."
"Good," she said, approving of the order. "Your uncle says to greet the ambassador if you pass the embassy. Hanif sent your schedule. And Rafi—" her voice softened— "mind your rest. You fly too much."
"I will rest," he promised. "I will also listen." It was not a code between them, but it was close. "How is Davao?" he added, because she loved to hear of it almost as much as he loved to go.
"You tell me," she teased. "You were there last week."
Images rose easy: a tita in an apron at dawn, slippered feet shuffling on cool tile; the first burst of pomelo at the market; vendors at Roxas Night Market calling "Kaon ta!" to anyone wearing hunger on their faces; afternoon rain hustling everyone under awnings that smelled like grill smoke and sugar.
"Davao is steady," he said. "Tita Lila sends love. She made me drink calamansi juice like medicine. I obeyed." He switched to Bisaya without noticing. "Lami gihapon ang ginataan sa among silingan. Naa koy mga ig-agaw nga mangulit. Pareho ra gihapon."
His mother laughed at his switch. "Your Bisaya gets better every year."
"It is the language of summer," he said. "And scolding."
"Then it is perfect for you." She paused. "You will visit them again before you return?"
"Yes. After Manila. I promised Tita."
"Very good." A beat, then the topic they always waltzed around: "And marriage?"
He rubbed his eyebrow with a thumb. "Amma…"
"I know," she said, gentler. "I will not push today. Only—your father grows older. The foundation grows busier. People are beginning to ask questions with names in them. I want, when those questions come, for you to answer with peace."
"I want that, too." He meant it. "I do not want a parade. I want a person who sees me when the cameras go away."
His mother was quiet long enough for the fan to make a full circle of sound. "Then you must put yourself in rooms where cameras are not the point," she said. "Eat where people eat. Work where the ground is not carpeted. Pray where no one cares what you wear."
He looked at the prayer mat and smiled. "That is the plan."
They said goodbye with the old phrases that fit like well-worn shoes, then he scrolled through the messages Hanif had sent. Meetings were stacked like dominoes: embassy courtesy call, a luncheon with a business council, a check-in with the family foundation's Manila partners. He dragged, with satisfaction, one block to the end of the week. He'd go to that one after he'd seen a different list—names not in suits but on community center rosters, the kind you could only find by asking the guard at the door and listening more than you spoke.
On the coffee table, the florist's card waited, weightless. He turned it over. Neat numbers. Sheryl. He could hear her voice insisting, "Text me the amount for my half. I'll GCash you. Non-negotiable." Pride wrapped in fairness. Fairness wrapped in pride. He respected both.
He opened a note and typed:
MOA → Intramuros (Leg 1): ₱_.
Intramuros → Sucat (Leg 2): ₱_.
Your share (Leg 1): ₱_.
He left the blanks blank. It felt right to send the truth, not a round number. Later, after dinner, he'd ask the guard for the typical meter fare and send the exact figure. He did not want the first thing he handed this stranger to be a guess.
The lobby guard on duty—silver nameplate, kind eyebrows—stood up a little straighter when Rafi came down with a tote. "Sir?"
"Good afternoon," Rafi said in careful Tagalog, then surrendered with a smile. "Ah… pwede ask? Taxi fare—MOA to Intramuros—how much, usually?"
The guard thought in the way of men who had been asked for directions all their lives. "Depende sa traffic, sir. Mga… one-fifty, two hundred. Kung rush hour, two-fifty."
"Salamat kaayo," Rafi said, Bisaya sneaking back because gratitude made old words rise first.
"Bisaya ka, sir?" the guard grinned.
"Dili. Pero naay paryente ko sa Davao," Rafi said. Not Bisaya by birth, but claimed by summers.
"Ay, mao diay. Sige, sir."
Back upstairs, he wrote: ₱180 on the meter. Your half is ₱180. I'll send a photo of the receipt when I have one next time, promise. He did not hit send. Not yet. He didn't want to be a message in her phone before vows were finished and shoes were off and the sweat of the day had cooled. Let the day breathe first.
He took the condo keycard and went out to find water that hadn't sat in a fridge. Field Residences emptied into the kind of small city that was always pretending to be a town—guards who knew your shoes, vendors who remembered if you liked calamansi in your iced tea, kids playing under a tree while a grandma used a sandal as punctuation.
At the convenience store, a teenager stared at his prayer beads and then at his face and then at the beads again, curious and polite.
"Tagalog ko kulang," Rafi said in apology, switching to English to save them both. "Water, two. And—this." He pointed to a pack of crackers. The teenager nodded, rang it up, and said "Salamat po" with the drawn-out o older people used. Rafi said it back the same way and made them both laugh.
On the walk back, his phone buzzed. Hanif.
Embassy lunch moved to Thursday. Wear the blue. Do not be late.
Also: the foundation partner in Manila sent three proposals for your "personal review." I said you would look. Do not disappear.
Rafi considered the three PDFs. Two were glossy, all margin and marble. One was short, typed without a logo, words plain as bread: Barangay Waste Segregation Pilot – Volunteers Needed. The budget was a spreadsheet that had to be printed and scanned at a shop, the edges slightly skewed. Someone had done the math like they did family math—by hand, with a pen they'd borrowed and returned.
He bookmarked that one.
When evening poured the heat off the hallway, he called his aunt in Davao. She answered on the second ring, the way women do when they've been waiting without wanting to sound like they were.
"Rafael!" Tita Lila sang, using the long name she'd adopted the first summer he'd arrived with a suitcase and too-formal shoes. "Niabot ka na sa Manila?"
"Niabot ko, Tita," he said, smiling into the vowels. "Safe. Nag-pray na pud ko. Ug naka-kaon."
"Maayo. Ayaw kalimot ug tubig. Sunod semana, ari na pud, ha? Ang bata sa silingan nangutana nganong taas kaayo ka ug ngano dili ka mokaon ug baboy."
He laughed. The neighbor's kid asked why you're so tall and why you don't eat pork. "Ingon lang, 'tungod kay gusto niya mulupad, unya Muslim siya.'" Because he wants to fly, and because he's Muslim. It would make sense to a child.
"Ambot nimo," she said fondly. "Pag-amping diha."
"I will." He hesitated. "Tita… if someone in your barangay wanted to start a small project—segregating trash so the drains don't flood—who would they ask first?"
"Our kapitan," she said immediately. "Pero mas kusog ang mama sa PTA kaysa kapitan usahay. Ngano man?"
"Curious lang," he said. Just curious. But the words on the plain proposal had already set a small hook in him.
He ended the call and lay on the sofa again, not to sleep but to let Manila settle. The condo hummed softly, the kind of hum you heard only when you were alone. He thought of Davao—his cousins outside playing tumba-lata, his aunt haggling at Bankerohan Market, the afternoon he'd been fourteen and learned the Bisaya for "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to break it" after knocking a guava jar off a shelf.
He thought of Java—the kraton's cool corridors, his father's measured steps, the way the court musicians tuned instruments like they were combing a horse. Duty pressed like a hand between his shoulder blades. It wasn't a shove. It wasn't a cage. But you felt it when you leaned forward.
He thought, finally, of the woman on the bricked walk by the bay. The scuffed glove. The steady voice. The way she tried, even in a rush, to do what was fair. He liked that her first instinct had not been to accept a ride for free, or to flirt, or to perform gratitude. It had been to split the cost like equals.
He did not know her beyond a number on a florist's card and a laugh that, for a beat, had unknotted the travel behind his eyes. He did not know if she would answer a message. He did not want to turn the moment into a pursuit. He wanted, simply, to honor what had been real about it: two strangers sharing a cab and a city and a brief intention to be kind.
At sunset he went down again, this time to walk. The air smelled like fried things and gasoline and the kind of jasmine that ornery vines make when no one watches. He counted the steps to the gate, to the curb, to the small chapel where a guard had once let him sit on the stairs when it rained. He greeted the taho vendor and practiced a sentence he knew he'd mangle: "Pwede ko mangayo… gamay lang." Can I ask… just a little.
"Pwede," the vendor said, already scooping the soft tofu with a smile. Rafi added arnibal, skipped the sago, and ate standing up, thinking about how many words in this city were close enough to the words that had raised him if you said them gently.
Back upstairs, he opened the proposal again. The person who had typed it—Sheryl?—had costed out compost pits, sacks, gloves, signage, and snacks for volunteers with an accountant's patience and a sister's care. He pictured hands counting coins by candlelight and decided that was too easy a story to write for someone you didn't know. He erased the image and replaced it with a rule:
Do not turn strangers into lessons. Meet them. Then decide.
He finally typed the message.
Hi. Rafi here—the coin guy from MOA. I reached Field Residences. The meter from MOA to Intramuros was ₱180. Since I got off last, I paid the full fare. If you still want to split, your share is ₱180. No rush. Also—congratulations on surviving four-inch heels.
He hovered over send, then set the phone down. Not yet. Let the day finish being her friend's. Let the flowers wilt a little and the coordinator take off her headset and someone's lolas finish their stories. He would send it later, when congratulations felt like a postscript, not an interruption.
On the table, the sampaguita kept the room honest. The garland would brown by morning. Luck always did. But its scent had already done what it came to do: it had braided the stranger in pink into the day in a way that did not need candles or a newspaper, just the plain fact of two people going in the same direction for a while and trying, between here and there, to be decent.
Rafi rinsed the glass, turned the fan to low, and stretched on the sofa with his forearm over his eyes. He was still a prince, whether he hid it or not. He was still a son, a nephew, a donor with a calendar people bowed to. But here, for now, he was a man who spoke more Bisaya than Tagalog and preferred markets to ballrooms and carried a coin for bad sidewalks and good luck.
He slept with the city's small sounds stitching themselves into a net. Somewhere, traffic unspooled across bridges. Somewhere, a church cooled. Somewhere, a bridesmaid with a scuffed glove lifted her phone and saw a message that had not yet been sent.
Tomorrow would be for rooms with microphones and rooms with plastic chairs. Tonight was for breath and jasmine and the quiet relief of knowing exactly where you'd put your crown: on a shelf, for now, beside a florist's card and a garland that smelled like a beginning.