The next morning, I escaped to the palengke. Vendors shouted prices; fish glimmered like coins on ice. An old woman selling suman asked where I was from.
“My mother-in-law doesn’t like me,” I confessed to a stranger, surprised by my own honesty.
The woman laughed softly. “Here, we say love is like adobo. It looks dark before it tastes right.”
I carried that thought home with tomatoes and guilt.
A typhoon came without ceremony. Rain hammered the roof. The power failed. In the dark, Miguel was called to help at the evacuation center.
When he left, Doña Elena lit candles and handed me a towel. “We will check the neighbors.”
We waded through ankle-deep water, knocking on doors, counting elders and children. At one house, a pregnant woman shivered.
Doña Elena removed her shawl and wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders without hesitation.
I watched her move—decisive, tireless. Not cruel. Not cold.
That night, soaked and exhausted, she brewed ginger tea for me and pressed a warm mug into my hands. “You will catch a fever,” she said.
The wall inside me cracked.
The next day, Doña Elena called me into her room. She opened the wooden chest again. Inside were letters tied with ribbon, black-and-white photos, the mended terno.
“I fixed it,” she said, handing me the dress. “My mother taught me how.”
She sat, suddenly older. “When my husband died, people watched me closely. I learned to be careful. When Miguel married, I was afraid—to lose him, to fail you.”
Tears blurred my vision. “I thought you hated me.”
She shook her head. “I did not know how to show love without control.”
The twist arrived quietly: the villain I had prepared for was a guardian guarding too tightly.
We began again. She taught me recipes—sinigang sour as homesickness, leche flan smooth as forgiveness. I taught her my language; she corrected my Tagalog with laughter now.
We attended Simbang Gabi together. She held my arm during the long prayers. When gossip brushed against us, she stood firm. “She is my daughter,” she said.
Miguel watched us with a relieved smile.
Months later, under the same talisay tree, we celebrated a new beginning. Doña Elena placed the terno on my shoulders. “Wear it,” she said. “Add your story to ours.”
I understood then: love does not always arrive soft. Sometimes it arrives as duty, as fear, as silence—and waits for patience to turn it gentle.
My mother-in-law was not the villain of my story. She was its quiet hero, teaching me that family is learned, not inherited, and that the most beautiful endings are the ones earned together.