12In one of her letters from Bahrain, my mother said she wanted to swim across the sea to Kuwait to meet my father or at least find out what had happened to him after the war. She didn’t know that all she needed to do was come home to the Philippines and find out there.
One night in 1996, or about a year after my mother came back from Bahrain, I was lying on the sofa in the sitting room of our little house, after an exhausting day at work with my grandfather. Aunt Aida and Merla were watching television and my mother was with Adrian in my room because there was a power cut at her husband’s house. Suddenly we heard Uncle Pedro calling ‘Aida, Aida!’ from outside. He opened the door and, clearly bursting to share some news, he asked, ‘Where’s Josephine? I went to her house and there was no o
