The applause sounded wrong.
It echoed too sharply inside the session hall, clanging against the marbled walls like hollow brass. Cameras flashed, capturing his every blink, every breath, but there was nothing behind the eyes anymore.
Ralph stood at the rostrum, tie perfectly knotted, voice steady. Yet the rhythm was gone, the rhythm Sarah used to breathe into his speeches. She had a way of cutting through his drafts, circling words with quiet precision. "Don't speak like a politician, sir," she'd tease. "Speak like a man with something to lose."
Now, his words were safe. Polished. Dead.
He saw his reflection in the teleprompter glass and barely recognized the man staring back — weary, sculpted by headlines, softened by regret.
In the gallery, an empty seat waited, her seat.
He didn't linger on it, but the space felt heavier than the air itself. He ended early, his closing statement stripped of flourish.
"…and may we continue serving this country with integrity."
A lie, perhaps. Or a wish.
The cameras cut; applause filled the void.
Outside, reporters swarmed him like hornets. "Congressman Del Mar, any comment on the continuing investigation?" "Sir, what's your stance now that Sarah Cruz is being tagged as the mastermind?"
Ralph smiled his mechanical smile. "No comment."
The convoy moved. Inside the tinted car, silence. His driver didn't dare play the radio. Through the window, Manila blurred, gray, wet, unkind.
He leaned back, eyes closed. But all he could hear was her voice, clipped, firm, impossible to forget. "Never let them corner you. Smile when you bleed."
He'd mastered that lesson too well.
The radio hissed before her voice came on, his voice, broadcast live from the Capitol.
Sarah sat cross-legged on the cold floor of her apartment, hair tied in a careless knot, wearing one of her brother's old shirts. The coffee beside her had gone cold hours ago. She'd been listening since dawn.
"…and may we continue serving this country with integrity."
His tone faltered slightly on the last word. She noticed, of course she did. She had trained him to notice such fractures in others; he never realized he'd adopted her own rhythms.
She smiled faintly. Sadness and pride mixed like rust and rain.
The world thought she had betrayed him. That she'd sold his secrets to the Villaflors. That every move she'd made, every carefully worded statement, had been part of a plan to bring him down.
They didn't know she was the one who took the blame to keep the gun away from his head.
Her apartment was small, anonymous. The kind of place where no one asked questions. A fan buzzed in the corner; laundry hung limp by the window. In the silence between broadcasts, she wrote in a notebook, fragments of speeches, maybe letters, maybe apologies.
Sometimes, her pen slipped, and his name appeared in the margins.
Ralph. R.D.M. Congressman.
Each title further from the man she'd once known, the man who used to drive her home without a word, the man who opened doors with the kind of courtesy that felt like confession.
She missed that, the small gestures that spoke more than declarations ever could.
But she had learned that silence was a weapon too.
And tonight, it was all she had left.
Night came heavy.
The city was alive, but his office felt embalmed, too neat, too still. Memos stacked like unspoken thoughts.
Ralph loosened his tie and stared out the window. The skyline stretched like a promise no one intended to keep.
He thought of calling her, had thought of it every night since she left. But what would he say? Come back? Forgive me? Save me again?
Even now, surrounded by aides and cameras, he couldn't admit to anyone how much of his strength had always been borrowed from her calm.
He picked up an old memo from months ago, her handwriting looping across the margin: "End this line with grace. People remember grace."
He traced the ink with his thumb, as if the shape of her words might lead him back to her.
"Sir," his aide interrupted softly from the doorway. "Your statement for tomorrow's hearing..."
"Leave it," Ralph said.
He wanted to be alone with his ghosts.
And she was the loudest of them all.
Outside her window, rain threaded down the glass.
She turned off the radio, tired of hearing his name paired with hers in the same sentence, always as accusation, never as memory.
She folded the newspaper on her lap. The headline screamed: 'Del Mar Denies Affair, Staffer Still Missing.'
Missing. As if she were a criminal hiding from justice.
Sarah exhaled slowly, then opened her laptop, an old file blinked awake: Speech_DelMar_Integrity.docx.
She scrolled to the end, adding one final line she'd never had the courage to suggest when she was still in his team:
"Integrity is not what survives the fire. It's what you choose to lose for the sake of truth."
She saved it. Closed the lid.
Sometimes, she wondered if he'd ever find it.
Two clocks ticked in separate rooms, both at 11:11 p.m.
He poured whiskey into a glass; she poured tea into a chipped mug.
He stood on a balcony overlooking the river; she sat by a window overlooking a wet alley.
Different lives, same loneliness.
He reread her resignation letter, the one she had left on his desk, printed and unsigned. The final line burned through him: "You taught me how to fight. Now let me fight for myself."
She stared at her phone, thumb hovering over his name. It was still there, Ralph Del Mar (Work), as if erasing him would feel like another betrayal.
When it rang suddenly, she froze.
Her heart stuttered.
Ralph's name flashed.
For a second, she almost answered.
But silence… silence was safer.
She watched the phone vibrate until it stopped. The room seemed to collapse inward after.
He stayed on the line long after the last tone, eyes shut, listening to the static.
It sounded a lot like grief.
He didn't sleep that night.
At 2 a.m., he sat on the couch, tie undone, hands clasped together. On the coffee table lay her old access card, confiscated during the investigation. He shouldn't have kept it, but he had.
He stared at her ID photo, the faint smile, the steady eyes.
She looked like someone who still believed in good men.
He wondered if she still did.
His phone buzzed. A message from his chief aide:
"Sir, the Villaflors just filed a motion for ethics inquiry. They want Sarah Cruz as their witness."
He read it twice. The first time with disbelief. The second time with something burning beneath his ribs, not anger, not yet, but the slow, coiling dread of realization.
They were coming for her. Again.
And this time, they'd use her silence against them both.
Morning sunlight leaked through the curtains, pale and cold. She hadn't slept either.
A soft knock on the door startled her. When she looked through the peephole, nothing. Just a brown envelope on the floor.
No name. Just her address, written in ink that bled slightly from the rain.
Inside, a flash drive.
No note. No signature.
Her stomach tightened. She slid it into her laptop, and froze.
The footage was grainy but clear: a private meeting, whispered deals, Villaflor aides exchanging envelopes. It wasn't her scandal this time.
It was theirs.
And Ralph was about to be the next target.
She closed the laptop, heart hammering.
There it was again, the pull she'd sworn to ignore. The instinct to protect him. To run back into a storm she barely survived once.
But she also knew the price of proximity. Betrayal was always the currency.
By sunrise, Ralph was on his balcony, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, tie loose. His aide's message still glowed on his screen.
He could already see the headlines forming:"Congressman Del Mar Faces Ethics Inquiry.""Key Witness: Former Staffer Sarah Cruz."
He clenched his jaw.
No.
They'd used her name to destroy him before. They'd do it again, unless he got to the truth first.
He turned toward the city, its skyline fractured by smoke and morning light.
"Sarah," he murmured to no one, "what did they do to you?"
The wind carried his words away, scattering them over the rooftops.
For the first time in weeks, his pulse felt alive again, anger, purpose, fear all twisting together.
The silence between them was breaking.
And what would rise after… might not be love.
But war.