Chapter 1

Tuesday
Dress fitting
Hair and makeup trial
Despedida de Soltera at Tita Chat’s

The message from my best friend Chesca was simple
and direct: You better be here by Tuesday lunch OR I WILL KILL YOU.

I got that not from the original email, but from the chain of people she had copied, in case I insisted on ignoring her. Still, it was Tuesday morning, and I was indeed back in Manila.

My mother did not know I was arriving that day. For months now, I had only been communicating with her through courtesy texts informing her which country or city I was in. She tried to call, but I only talked to her once, and just to tell her that roaming was expensive and she should just email me if she needed to speak to me.

That was mean of me, because I thought she would never figure out how to email. She did, but I still didn’t reply. The airport taxi dropped me off and I managed to make it to the stairs before she saw me.

“Kimberly! I swear you are going to give me a heart attack.” She put down her cigarette and gave me a hug.

I had a complicated relationship with my mother—just like I did with many females I can name. It was better now that I was twenty-seven years old, and only because we both accepted some
truths about each other: That I was no longer as immature as she thought me to be, and she was not as mature as I wanted her to be.

“You didn’t know I was arriving today?” I asked cautiously. Sure, she acted surprised that I was there, but Mrs. Erica Domingo was known for being dramatic every now and then.

She pressed a kiss on my cheek. “Honey, I knew you were supposed to be here today, but I said I wouldn’t believe it until I saw you in my house. How are you? Are you back for good this time?”

“Yes, my savings have been officially drained,” I said. “I’m back home now.” For better or worse.

People hated me. I don’t feel bad about it anymore. Everything is relative.

Depending on the day and person you asked, I was rude or manipulative or heartless and other more colorful words. To the point that, when my fiancé told me that he was in love with someone else—nine days before our wedding—a bunch of people actually thought, great, Kimberly Domingo was finally getting punished.

How could that even happen, right? How could you get that close to a wedding and see it fall apart?

Like with most disasters, once you stepped back and really thought about it, you realize that it wasn’t caused by just one thing.

First, there was the whirlwind romance. The time frame from first date to wedding date was a year, a short engagement.

Second, the groom-to-be had just gotten out of a relationship of several years, and though he was a great guy, there were many things he hadn’t worked out yet, things that came to a head embarrassingly close to our big day.

Third and maybe the most telling, the bride-to-be was me, and I was a bit of a mess.

Those who wanted to see Kimberly Domingo get hers had a lot of good stuff to choose from in the weeks and months that followed my non-wedding.

It started when I found out—through a phone call in the early afternoon, on my cell phone, which I had taken while sitting at my workstation. It wasn’t an office with a door, and my cubicle walls
looked and felt like plastic reinforced by a layer of thin carpet. Yeah, no soundproofing when I started raising my voice.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I tried to whisper, but as my former fiancé firmly explained to me that the wedding wouldn’t be happening, my voice started to get loud and shrill.

“What about the caterer?”

“We won’t get our deposit back, but at least we haven’t paid them in full yet.”

“But my lola’s already on her way!”Eighty-five years old and as we were speaking, flying in from California.

“I’m really sorry, Kimmy. But we really can’t do this.”

“You know what we can do? We can just shut up for a second and think about this. What happened?”

He was calm as he explained his decision to me, and what needed to be done. He had an answer for everything I threw at him: he was prepared to call all the companies we had booked to announce the cancellation, as well as all the guests, and was even offering to pay for a few things that I had advanced from my own account. And that I would have the money by Monday.

“Shit, Zack, I don’t fucking care about the money right now! What the hell happened?”

I can’t remember exactly what he had said. I was in a rage, and when the phone call ended, I was suddenly aware that I was in my place of work, and that everyone had probably heard that.

I don’t remember the rest of that day. My mother told me that I had come home late, but by then she already knew, because Zack had contacted her with his apologies. I have a vague memory of not wanting to go to work the next day. I remember crying intoher lap, wiping tears onto the floral-patterned fabric of her nightgown, first with loud, angry sobs, and then hiccupping like a child. I had never felt like that before, ever.

Humiliated. That was the word.

It was hard to go to work after that. No one said anything to my face, of course, but come on. This was an office, just like any other within the tall buildings along Ayala Avenue. It was full of people who liked to talk about other people, and in my case, with some schadenfreude. I worked at a large consumer goods company, and as an upstart management trainee, was under more pressure—and given more visibility—than the average employee. Even the mere rumor of wedding troubles would have been enough to earn me the top spot in all office gossip conversations, but with the scene I had caused, screaming into my cell phone? I had guaranteed it.

My mother told me it would get better, and eventually the office started gossiping about someone else. But I had lost something, and every time I worked with someone, I wondered if they respected me less. Some people at least had the benefit of hitting rock bottom in private.

The last straw was when I showed up at a meeting, months after the incident, to discover that the brief I had prepared for all participants lacked one sheet of paper. I had forgotten to print it out.

My boss at the time, not exactly the nicest person either, made a big deal out of it for fifteen minutes. While he ranted to the eight executives sitting around that conference table—also to the two regional officers on conference call with us
in Shanghai and Sydney—I sat back and took it, my nails digging into the leather upholstery of my swivel chair
.
“I think it’s because you didn’t take a break, Kimberly,” he said. “I’ve let your mistakes the past few months slide, but this is such an amateur mistake. You’ve been letting your personal life get in the way of your work.”

I don’t need this.My side of the story? The project we were presenting was crap, and I had unwittingly given my boss a way to blame me for everything.

That missing page wasn’t that big of a mistake, but parading it around in front of everyone—and making it seem like I was an emotional wreck—was undoing all the years of hard work I had put in.

I excused myself from the meeting, headed to HR, and told them I was quitting. As soon as I could, I found a flight to
LA.

Some people think I didn’t do the right thing then, that leaving was cowardly. I thought so too. I had been dreading this trip back, but I knew I’d have to deal with it eventually.