The Invisible Bridge: My Last Goodbye

PROLOGUE: THE COVENANT Manila, 1998 The rain did not fall so much as it drowned the city. It was a solid, roaring curtain of water that turned the streets of the old Santa Cruz district into rushing brown rivers. Inside a cramped apartment that smelled of mildew and adobo, the world was reduced to the flickering light of a single candle. Elara held the child to her breast—a girl, barely a month old, with a dusting of fair hair that promised the European features of the man who had given her to Elara, and then, inevitably, taken himself away. Charles Laurent stood at the window, his silhouette a dark cutout against the storm. He was a statue of Belgian grace fraying at the edges in this humid, chaotic country he had professed to love. “The airport will be closed if this continues,” Elara said, her voice quiet, not a complaint, but a statement of the inevitable. Charles turned. The candlelight caught the anguish in his eyes. He was leaving in the morning. His father was dead. The empire, a sprawling conglomerate built on art and antiquities, demanded its heir. He walked to the bed, kneeling so his eyes were level with hers. “Come with me,” he pleaded, for the hundredth time. “To Brussels. You and her. You will want for nothing.” Elara smiled, a sad, knowing thing. “And live as what, Charles? Your secret? The Filipino mistress and her bastard child, hidden away in a gilded European apartment? She would grow up in the shadows of your world. Here, she can grow in the sun.” The word ‘bastard’ hung in the air, a shard of glass. Charles flinched. He reached into the pocket of his linen trousers and withdrew a small object, wrapped in faded velvet. “I cannot give you my name,” he whispered, his voice raw. “But I can give her my soul.” He unfolded the cloth. In his palm lay a pendant. It was not the polished, flawless gold of a jeweler’s display. This was ancient, heavy, its surface textured with the hammer marks of a forgotten artisan. It was shaped like a swirling sun, its center inlaid with a single, dark pearl that seemed to drink the candlelight. “This is Lágrimas del Sol,” Charles said, the Spanish name rolling softly off his tongue. “Tears of the Sun. It was forged by a lost tribe in the Cordilleras centuries ago. My great-grandfather acquired it… not honorably. It has been the shame of my family’s collection, a beautiful thing built on theft.” He looked from the gold to the child in her arms. “I am giving it back,” he said, his voice gaining a fierce, new strength. He pressed the cool, heavy metal into Elara’s hand. “This is not a gift. It is a covenant. It is her legacy. It is proof that my love for you was real, and that she is its most perfect creation. Keep it for her. When she is old enough, tell her it is a piece of her history, from both her lands. It is her bridge to me.” Elara’s fingers closed around the pendant. It was cold, then warm, as if absorbing the heat of her pulse. It felt less like a piece of jewelry and more like a heart, torn from one chest and placed in another. Charles leaned forward and kissed his daughter’s forehead. “Belgiana,” he breathed, naming her for the country he could not take her to. He stood and walked to the door without looking back. The storm swallowed him whole. Elara was alone. The only sound was the rain and the soft, sucking breath of her daughter. She looked down at the pendant in her hand. The dark pearl gleamed, a single, frozen tear. It was not a bridge. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that it was an anchor. And she had just tied it to her daughter’s fate. --- Makati City, present day. The city was a kingdom of glass and ambition, and from her thirty-second-floor cubicle, Belgiana Rosales was its quiet scribe. The midday sun bled gold against the skyscrapers, but in the sterile, chilled air of Laurent-Lee Holdings’ open-plan office, the light was a prisoner, filtered through polarized windows into a dull, perpetual glow. The only sounds were the funereal hum of the HVAC and the subdued tap-tap-tapping of a hundred keyboards, a symphony of corporate subservience. Belgiana often felt she was curating a museum of other people's productivity, her own life a carefully filed document in a drawer labeled 'Pending'. Against her skin, beneath the crisp, white cotton of her blouse, the pendant was a secret weight. Lágrimas del Sol. Tears of the Sun. Her fingers, flying across the keyboard to input another vendor’s invoice, itched to touch it. To trace the ancient, hammered grooves of the gold—a topography of a history she could only imagine—to press the pad of her thumb against the dark, luminous pearl at its center. Her Lola said the pearl was formed from a single, perfect tear shed by a goddess for a lost mortal love, holding the memory of a thousand-year-old rain. It was her tether, her rosary. A tactile reminder that she was not just Belgiana Rosales, a low-level accounts assistant, invisible in a sea of a hundred other interchangeable souls. She was Belgiana, her mother Elara’s daughter. She was the keeper of a covenant made in the monsoon rains of a past she never knew. It was the one part of her day that belonged not to Laurent-Lee, but to the ghost of her mother and the phantom of her father. The work itself was a numbing balm. In the clean, logical lines of debits and credits, there was no ambiguity, no emotional residue. A number was what it was. It was in these ledgers that she found a strange, cold comfort. It was the space between the numbers—the lunches she couldn't afford, the vacations she never took—where the ache of her life resided. “Rosales! The quarterly reports for the European board. Now.” The voice was a whip-c***k, slicing through the low hum. It belonged to Jessica Lim, Vice President of Strategic Finance. She was a vision of razor-sharp elegance, a woman who looked as if she had been forged in a boardroom rather than born. Her black sheath dress was a blade of silk, her posture a lesson in absolute control. Her gaze, as it swept over Belgiana’s desk, was one of detached assessment, like a curator evaluating a piece of furniture of questionable provenance. It was a look that could strip the confidence from a seasoned executive, and it made Belgiana’s spine straighten automatically. “Yes, Ma’am Lim. They’re ready.” She stood, her movements precise, and handed over the thick, bound folder. The cover was immaculate, every figure inside triple-checked. It was a part of her she could control, this perfection in the details. This small defiance against the chaos of her own history. Jessica took it, her manicured fingers—a perfect, bloodless crimson—closing around the report without a word of thanks. But her eyes, dark and sharp enough to cut diamond, did not leave Belgiana. They dropped, for a fleeting, heart-stopping second, to the base of Belgiana’s throat. The top button of her blouse had come undone during her frantic morning, and the fine gold chain was visible, a delicate sin against the stark white cotton. A flicker. That was all. A microscopic fracture in Jessica’s polished mask. It wasn't mere recognition; it was a predator’s instinct, a sudden, laser-focused hunger. It was the look of a woman who had spent a lifetime hunting for specific, valuable things, and who had just found one in the most unexpected of places. It was more than seeing a piece of jewelry; it was seeing a key. A key to a lock she thought was permanently sealed. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, it was gone. Jessica’s expression smoothed back into an impassive mask of authority. “The gala tonight. Showcasing the new Southeast Asian acquisitions. Senior staff are expected to represent the company’s… unified front.” Her eyes performed another swift, dismissive inventory of Belgiana, from her simple ponytail to her sensible heels. “Be there. 7 PM sharp. Don’t embarrass the department.” The words were not just an order; they were a warning, a subtle demarcation of her place. She turned, a pivot on a razor’s edge, and walked away, her heels striking the polished concrete floor with a sound like bones breaking. Belgiana sank back into her chair, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She could still feel the phantom burn of that gaze. Her fingers, suddenly clumsy, flew to her throat and fastened the button, hiding the chain. She saw it. The thought was a cold trickle of dread, seeping into the carefully constructed compartments of her mind. Her Lola’s voice, weathered and wise, echoed from a thousand miles away: “Some treasures, anak, are meant to be kept in the heart, not worn on the neck. The world has hungry eyes, and the hungriest are not in the slums, but in the palaces.” For the first time, she understood the true weight of that warning. It wasn't about theft; it was about consumption. “Hey, you okay? You look like you just got an audit notice from the BIR.” The voice, warm and laced with a conspiratorial concern, came from beside her. Justin Cruz leaned against the fabric-covered wall of her cubicle, his tie loosened just so, the first two buttons of his shirt open. He was from Business Development, and he moved through the corporate jungle with the easy grace of a natural predator—charming, ambitious, and for reasons Belgiana still couldn’t fathom, intensely interested in her. He was a creature of the present, all easy smiles and forward momentum, and his attention was a spotlight that both thrilled and unnerved her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for her. His smile was a flash of white, a beacon of life in the fluorescent wasteland. She forced a smile, feeling the strain at the corners of her mouth. “Just… Jessica.” It was the office shorthand for a particular brand of existential dread. Justin rolled his eyes, a gesture that felt both rebelliously intimate and dangerously dismissive of the power Jessica wielded. “Don’t let her get to you. She’s all bark.” He leaned in closer, and she caught the faint, clean scent of his cologne—sandalwood and something citrusy. It was a welcome assault on the sterile office air. “Besides,” he murmured, his eyes locking with hers, “you’re the only person in this entire department who actually understands the numbers, not just punches them. You see the story they tell. The flow of money, the secrets it hides. That’s a different kind of power. She knows it. That’s probably what that look was about.” His words were a balm, a validation she hadn’t realized she craved. He saw her. Not just the quiet woman in the cubicle, but the mind behind the data. He was building a bridge to her, and she was eagerly, desperately, meeting him halfway. He leaned back, the moment breaking. “So. Save a dance for me tonight? I hear the band is supposed to be decent, and I promise not to step on your feet. It’s a strategic alliance I’m very interested in.” In his eyes, she saw a refuge from the ghosts that haunted her. A potential new bridge, one built on the present, on shared laughter and whispered secrets, not on the silent, aching void of the past. A chance to belong to someone, to here, to now. To finally stop being her father’s daughter and start being her own woman. “Maybe,” she said, and this time, the smile that touched her lips was real, warming her from the inside out. It felt like a decision. A choice to step away from the abyss of her past and toward the solid, charming ground he represented. As he winked and walked away, weaving through the cubicles with an easy confidence that seemed to bend the very atmosphere around him, her hand instinctively went back to her throat, seeking the pendant’s familiar comfort through the layers of cloth. But the metal felt different now. No longer just an anchor to the past. It felt like a target. And the hunt had just begun.