We searched for him. It wasn’t easy. Mark had disappeared from everything. He changed his number, his address, his university. Nobody wanted to tell us anything. When we finally found him, it wasn’t because he forgave us. It was because a former teacher told us he was working near Cubao, in an electronics parts store.
I went alone. I saw him behind the counter. Thinner. More serious. With a short beard and a small scar near his eyebrow. The scar from that night. When he saw me enter, he didn’t move. “Mark…” I said. He closed the cash register. “No.” Just that. No.
I cried. I told him about Bella. I told him she was dying. I told him the doctors needed tests. I told him she was his sister.
Then he looked at me in a way he had never looked at me before. “I was your son, too.” I didn’t know how to respond. Because there was nothing that could be responded.
Even so, he came to the hospital. Not for me. Not for Ernesto. Maybe for the little girl who once called him “Kuya” and ran after him with a sketchbook.
When Mark entered the room, Bella was awake. Very weak, but awake. She saw him and started to cry. “Kuya…” He stayed at the door. He didn’t get closer. Bella raised her hand, trembling. “Forgive me.”
I felt the air leave me. Ernesto took a step. “Bella, don’t speak.” She looked at him. And in her eyes, I saw fear. The same fear I failed to see two years before. “No,” she whispered. “Not anymore.”
Mark looked at her without blinking. Bella cried with her whole body. “I lied. You never touched me. Never. Dad told me what to say.”
The world stopped. It wasn’t a clean revelation. It was dirty. Belated. Unforgivable.
I heard my own heart pounding inside my head. Mark didn’t speak. Bella continued, through sobs: “He told me you weren’t his real son. That Mom loved you more. That if I said that, you would leave, and she would only love me. I was scared. Later, I couldn’t tell the truth. Everyone hated you. I thought if I spoke up, they would hate me too.”
