A week after the quiet civil wedding, Olivia returned to Sta. Agueda for the first time as a Jimenez. The SUV cut through the familiar roads, past the rice fields and the small sari-sari stores she had known all her life. Yet everything felt foreign now, as though she were walking through a memory that no longer belonged to her.
Simon had handed her a folder that morning, thick with preliminary maps and documents on the Madanunan Crown. Her task was simple. Visit the proposed entry points, check the flow of foot traffic in neighboring sitios, speak with the city hall personnel about old title records. It sounded small in the shadow of a project so grand, but it mattered. Simon trusted her to observe, to listen, to understand the people of Sta. Agueda the way he never could.
It was the fi
