Chapter 1: One Americano, No Sugar

There are three kinds of customers at Second Pour.

The first kind knows exactly what they want. The second kind stares at the menu for five minutes and orders a caramel macchiato anyway. The third kind leans on the counter, smiles too much, and asks if I'm "single, or just working."

I was handling a third kind when the bell above the door rang.

"Working," I told the man in front of me, sliding his iced mocha across the counter. "Always working. Enjoy your drink, sir."

He left with his mocha and his ego. I wiped the counter and checked the clock. 4:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until my shift ended, and then a forty-minute jeepney ride home, where my little sister would need help with her physics homework and my father would pretend his back didn't hurt.

Twenty-five years old. Summa cum laude. Business Administration, with a minor in Economics.

And I could make a perfect rosetta in under a minute.

"Mira." Ate Bing, our manager, appeared at my elbow like a ghost with eyeliner. She was gripping my arm hard enough to bruise. "Mira. Mira."

"Ate, I'm right here."

"Don't look at the door."

So naturally, I looked at the door.

A man was standing just inside it, and the whole café had gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when a lion walks into it. Tall. Black suit, no tie, collar open at the throat. Dark hair pushed back like he'd run his hand through it on the way in and didn't care how it landed. Behind him, outside the glass, a black car sat in the no-parking zone. A huge man in sunglasses stood beside it, reading a newspaper.

Upside down.

The man at the door turned his head, and his eyes found mine across the room. Not slowly. Not by accident. Like he already knew exactly where I would be standing.

My heart stopped. Then it started again, badly, like an old motorcycle in the rain.

No.

Six years. Six years, and I had gotten so good at not thinking about him. I had a system. I didn't read business news. I scrolled past anything with the word "Valeriano" in it. When customers left magazines on the tables with his face on the cover, I flipped them over before I wiped the table.

And now Dante Valeriano was walking toward my counter like he owned it.

Which, knowing him, he probably could if he wanted to.

"Oh my God," Ate Bing whispered. "Oh my God, he's coming here. Do you know who that is? That's the Valeriano. The billionaire. The one from the magazine. He's richer than the whole mall. Mira, fix your hair."

"I'm not fixing my hair."

"Fix your face, then."

I didn't fix anything. I stood behind the register, picked up a marker and a cup, and arranged my expression into the polite, empty smile I gave every customer. If I had survived calculus, my father's surgery bills, and four years of rich kids asking if my uniform was "secondhand or vintage," I could survive one coffee order.

He stopped in front of the counter.

Up close, he was worse. Older, sharper, the softness of nineteen carved off his face. There was a thin scar near his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before. He smelled like rain and something expensive.

"Good afternoon," I said. "Welcome to Second Pour. What can I get you?"

He looked at me for a long moment. I counted the seconds. Three. Four.

"Americano," he said. His voice was lower than I remembered. "No sugar."

I almost laughed. I didn't, but it was close.

Because I knew a secret about Dante Valeriano that his board of directors, his business rivals, and every magazine in the country didn't know. The most feared young CEO in Asia couldn't drink coffee without three sugars. In senior year, I had caught him dumping packets into his cup behind the library, and he had made me swear on my scholarship that I would never tell anyone.

"No sugar," I repeated. "Are you sure?"

Something flickered in his eyes. Gone before I could name it.

"I'm sure."

"Name for the order?"

Behind me, I heard Ate Bing make a small, dying sound. You don't ask Dante Valeriano for his name, that sound said. Everyone knows his name.

He tilted his head. "You know my name, Mira."

It was the first time in six years I'd heard him say it. Two syllables. It shouldn't have done anything to me. It did several things to me, all of them stupid.

I uncapped the marker and wrote on the cup in big, cheerful letters: DONTE.

I turned the cup so he could see it. "That'll be one hundred forty pesos."

The corner of his mouth moved. On anyone else, it would have been nothing. On Dante, it was practically a parade.

"Donte," he said.

"Is that wrong? I'm so sorry, sir. We get a lot of customers."

He took out a black card and placed it on the counter. I took a five-hundred bill out of the register for change before I remembered he'd handed me a card, and I put the bill back with my face burning. He watched me do it. He didn't say anything. That was worse.

I made his Americano myself, because Ate Bing was still standing frozen next to the pastry case, staring at him like he was a solar eclipse. My hands were steady. I made sure of that. Double shot, hot water, no sugar.

Then, before I could stop myself, I set three sugar packets on the saucer beside it.

I put the cup down in front of him. He looked at the sugar. Then at me.

"I said no sugar."

"I know," I said. "It's complimentary. In case you change your mind."

For the first time since he walked in, he actually smiled. Small. Quick. The same crooked smile he used to give me across the chemistry lab when Ma'am Ocampo wasn't looking. It hit me like a truck I had seen coming and stepped in front of anyway.

"You haven't changed," he said quietly.

"You have," I said.

The smile disappeared. His jaw tightened, and for one second he looked like the boy I knew, the one who had stood in the rain outside my boarding house at 2 AM and told me, in a voice like ice, that he was getting engaged to someone else. That I had been "a nice distraction." That I should go home.

I had gone home. And I had cried for exactly one semester, and then I had stopped, because scholarship students don't get to fail a semester over a boy.

"Enjoy your coffee, sir," I said. "Next customer, please."

There was no next customer. The café was empty except for two college girls in the corner who were openly filming him on their phones. He didn't move.

"What time does your shift end?" he asked.

"Never."

"Mira."

"Sir, if you have a complaint about your drink, you can fill out the feedback form." I pushed the little card holder toward him. "We take customer satisfaction very seriously."

He looked down at the feedback form. He picked up the tiny pen chained to the counter. And to my absolute horror, he started writing.

I watched him write. I couldn't help it. Ate Bing was leaning so far over my shoulder to look that her chin was basically on my collarbone.

When he was done, he folded the card in half, slid it across the counter, picked up his coffee and the three sugar packets, and walked out.

The bell rang behind him. Outside, the giant man folded his upside-down newspaper, opened the car door, and they were gone.

The whole café exhaled.

"Mira," Ate Bing breathed. "Mira Santos. You are going to explain everything to me, right now, or I am going to die on this floor and haunt you."

I unfolded the card.

Under "How was your experience today?" he had checked the box marked Excellent.

Under "Comments," in handwriting I would have recognized anywhere, he had written:

The barista spelled my name wrong. Please don't fire her. She does it on purpose.

P.S. Your father's clinic bill is paid. Don't fight me on this one.

I read it three times. Then I crumpled it in my fist, because the alternative was crying behind the espresso machine, and I had promised myself I would never cry over Dante Valeriano again.

"Ate," I said, very calmly. "I'm taking my break."

"Your shift ends in eight minutes."

"Then I'm taking a very short break."

I went into the storage room, shut the door, and sat down on a sack of coffee beans. My phone buzzed in my apron pocket. I almost didn't check it.

It was a text from an unknown number.

Unknown: He came to see you. How sweet.

Unknown: Tell Dante his cousin says hello.

I stared at the screen. Outside, through the little storage room window, a silver car I had never seen before pulled away from the curb across the street.

It had been parked there, I realized, the whole time.