On the seventy-fourth day after the sky burned, there was nothing left to eat in Quezon City.Joaquin Mercado sat on the kitchen floor of the house he had paid for over eleven years and listened to the silence. It was a different kind of silence than before the storm. Back then, Manila had never been quiet. Jeepneys honked, karaoke machines bled through thin walls, and roosters screamed at four in the morning. Now there was only wind, and sometimes gunshots far away near Commonwealth Avenue.No electricity. No signal. No water from the taps since the second week. The government trucks had stopped coming on day thirty-one. After that, people stopped pretending to be neighbors.In his hands was the last can of sardines.He had been saving it for eleven days, hiding it inside an old rice sack behind the water heater. His stomach had long stopped growling. It only ached now, a dull, hollow pain that made his hands shake as he worked the can open with a kitchen knife."Bea," he called soft

Lola Remedios turned eighty on a Sunday, and the whole Mercado clan came to Marikina to celebrate.The old house on Bayan-Bayanan Avenue was packed from the gate to the kitchen. Titas fanned themselves under the mango tree. Titos argued about basketball over bottles of San Miguel. Cousins Joaquin hadn't seen since Christmas ran around the yard with sticky fingers, and in the center of the long table sat a whole lechon, its skin glistening like amber glass. Somewhere inside, a videoke machine was already scoring someone's off-key rendition of "My Way."Joaquin stood at the gate for a moment and let it all wash over him.In his first life, he had never seen this house again after the storm. Marikina had flooded in the third week, when the dams upstream failed without power to control the gates. He never learned what happened to Lola."Quin! Don't just stand there!" Tita Baby waved a paper plate at him. "Your Lola's been asking for you all morning!"He found her in her wooden rocking cha

"PCSO will never disclose the identity of another winner," Atty. Ocampo said over the phone. "Not to you, not to me, not even with a court order unless there's a crime involved. Why?"Joaquin stood at the window of his rented room, watching tricycles crawl through the Cubao heat below. "Because he knew my numbers before I bought them."A long silence on the line."Mr. Mercado," she said carefully, "are you in some kind of danger I should know about?"*Everyone is,* he thought. *In seventy-nine days.*"No," he said. "Just curious."---He had made three decisions the night he walked out of the PCSO office.First, the money would stay invisible. Atty. Ocampo had moved it into a trust under a holding company with a boring name, Kalinaw Ventures, and not a single peso would touch his personal account.Second, he would stay in Cubao. The rented room, the wobbling fan, the landlady who thought he was a monster. As long as the world believed Joaquin Mercado was broke and ruined, nobody would

Joaquin didn't sleep much the night after he signed the papers for Villa Serrano.He lay on a thin foam mattress in the empty master bedroom, listening to the pine trees creak in the wind, and thought about a child who had never existed.In his first life, Trina had never been pregnant again. He was certain of it. He had lived beside her for seventy-four days after the storm, watched her ribs grow sharp beneath her blouse. There had been no second baby.So something had changed. And he didn't know if he had changed it, or someone else had.*It doesn't matter,* he told himself. *Build first. Think later.*Sixty-three days.---Tomi arrived at six the next morning with a pickup truck, two of his old Army buddies, and a clipboard full of sketches drawn in pencil on the back of repair receipts."Rule one," Tomi said, tapping the clipboard. "From the road, this place stays exactly as it is. A rich man's vacation house. Nothing more.""Agreed.""Rule two. We don't buy anything big from one

The letter arrived on Wednesday, delivered by courier to Atty. Ocampo's office in Ortigas.Joaquin read it twice in her air-conditioned conference room while the traffic crawled along Julia Vargas Avenue below. Thick cream paper. An embossed letterhead from a Makati law firm he'd seen on billboards.*Re: Demand for Liquidation and Delivery of Community Property**Our client, Mrs. Katrina V. Mercado, has come into possession of information that her lawful husband, Mr. Joaquin R. Mercado, received a PCSO jackpot prize during the subsistence of their marriage. Under the Family Code of the Philippines, property acquired by either spouse during the marriage forms part of the absolute community. Accordingly, our client demands one-half (1/2) of the said winnings, in the amount of no less than Two Hundred Eighty Million Pesos (₱280,000,000.00), and further demands that Mr. Mercado refrain from disposing of any community assets, including real property registered under Kalinaw Ventures, Inc.…