7. His Eyes

He looks wrong. That's the first thing, before anything else registers — my father's face, which I have known my entire life, laid out in a way I've never seen it. Pale, sunken at the cheeks, lips a shade of grey-blue I've only ever seen in movies. His hands are folded over his chest in a position he'd have hated, too formal, too still, nothing like the man who talked with his whole body.

Someone behind me makes a sound like the air's been punched out of them. My mother's chair scrapes back so hard it topples.

I stare at his face and I don't feel relief and I don't feel confirmation of anything — I feel a wrongness so total it doesn't fit inside my chest, because five days of collapse and hospitals and lab reports and Roman's whispered fear were supposed to lead to an answer, and instead they've led me to my father's dead face in a box that was never embalmed, and for one horrible second I think: *I did this for nothing. He's just gone. That's all this was.*

The church has gone completely silent except for the organ, still playing, someone forgetting to stop it.

I reach out — I don't decide to, my hand just moves — and I touch his cheek the way I used to when I was small enough to be lifted onto his shoulders.

It's warm. Not room-temperature warm. Body warm.

"Dad?" My voice comes out wrecked, barely a whisper, swallowed by two hundred people not breathing.

And then — right there, on camera, live, streaming to my aunt in Manila and to no one else who will ever quite believe it until they watch the footage back with their own eyes —

my father's eyelids move.