The Weight of Unspoken Vows
The lamp on Yen's desk burned low, its wick trimmed too many times to give a steady flame, so the light flickered across the ledger pages like something breathing. Four-thirty in the morning, and San Ildefonso still slept beneath a bruised indigo sky, the roosters not yet stirred to their duty. Yen preferred the hour precisely because of its silence. No children calling for her attention, no Mrs. Chu bustling through the corridors with her endless errands, no townsfolk passing by to whisper about the girl who kept the orphanage's books and kept herself apart from everyone else.
She dipped her pen and continued the column of figures: three sacks of rice donated by the Manalo family, two hundred pesos from the church's poor box, a crate of secondhand clothes left anonymously at the gate. Bahay Pag-asa survived on such fragments, stitched together month after month, and Yen had appointed herself its quiet seamstress. The numbers never lied to her. They never promised more than they gave. A donation was a donation — recorded, verified, complete. Nothing like the promises people made with their mouths and broke with their hands.
Outside, faint and carried on the wind from the…
