Ten Years of Autumn

Chapter 5: The Silent Shadow

Two weeks after the breakup, Anton packed his life into leather suitcases and boarded a flight to Singapore. I handed in my immediate transfer request to a different division on the opposite side of the building, desperate to erase every physical trace of him from my daily routine.

The silence he left behind was a physical weight. Manila felt colder, the traffic louder, and my small apartment near Legaspi Village felt like an empty tomb. I spent my nights staring at the ceiling, my chest hollowed out by a relentless, crushing yearning. I missed his voice, his sharp humor, and the way his hand felt tucked into mine. But pride and bruised hearts are stubborner than love. Neither of us reached out.

Then the nausea started.

At first, I blamed it on stress, sleepless nights, and the cheap convenience store meals I was forcing down. But by late August, the morning sickness turned violent. My head spun every time I caught a whiff of fried garlic or hot coffee.

Sitting on the edge of my bathroom tile on a humid Saturday afternoon, I stared at two bright pink lines glowing back at me from a plastic strip.

My heart didn't just beat; it shattered against my ribs.

Pregnant.

I fell back against the wall, my hands instinctively pressing against my flat stomach, tears pouring silently down my cheeks. A tiny life—a blend of Anton and me—was growing inside me, conceived during those quiet, desperate nights in his apartment before everything fell apart.

My immediate instinct was to pick up the phone and call him. I opened his chat thread—empty for six weeks—and stared at his profile picture. He looked polished, smiling beside corporate executives at a gala in Singapore. He was starting his dream life.

If I tell him now, I thought, a wave of suffocating fear crashing over me, he’ll come back out of obligation, not love. He’ll resent me for tethering him down just as he finally made it.

"No," I whispered to the empty bathroom, my voice cracking. "I won't trap him."

I decided to keep the secret locked away in my heart. I asked for a remote assignment, quietly relocating back to my family's old ancestral house in Batangas. The quiet coastal air was supposed to bring peace, but every corner of the town breathed his name. I walked past the old mango tree alone, my hands resting on my growing belly, yearning for the boy who used to sit beside me, utterly unaware that his world was about to change forever.

Months bled into each other. My belly swelled beneath oversized sweaters, and the baby's soft, rhythmic kicks became my only anchor in the crushing isolation. I was seven months pregnant, surviving on sheer willpower, when my world was suddenly shaken.

I was at the local health clinic in town for a routine checkup, waiting in the hallway with my heavy canvas bag over my shoulder, when a familiar, sleek black SUV pulled into the gravel driveway outside.

The car door opened. A tall figure in a navy suit stepped out into the blinding Batangas heat.

Anton.