Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~20 min read
POV: Valencia
Valencia has been in the Philippines for two weeks, and she is not healing.
That was the plan — come home, breathe the familiar air, let her mother’s cooking and her father’s steady presence put her back together again. Sleep in her childhood bed, help with the medical appointments, reconnect with the cousins and the aunts and the grandmother who prays the rosary every morning on the same wooden chair she has used for forty years. Let the heat and the noise and the ordinary rhythm of home remind her who she was before Dominic St. Clair, before the scandal, before she made the mistake of falling in love with a man whose world was so far from hers it might as well have been a different planet.
Except she is not healing. She is miserable in a way that feels indecent — surrounded by people who love her, in a home she grew up in, drowning anyway.
She misses Dominic constantly, with a specific, grinding ache that doesn’t care what time it is or what she’s doing. She’ll be sitting at the kitchen table watching her mother shell beans, and it hits — the way he looked at her in the penthouse kitchen in the early mornings when he thought she wasn’t watching. She’ll wake at 3 a.m. and reach for her phone and stop herself, and then check it anyway, scrolling through the messages she hasn’t answered. Dozens of them now. Not desperate messages, not pressure — just him. Telling her he’s thinking about her. Telling her Jules asked for her again. Small, careful messages from a man trying very hard not to push.
She misses Jules more than she can bear to examine directly.
That’s the thing she circles around, the thing she can’t quite look at straight-on. She keeps checking her phone to see if Dominic has sent a photo of him, and he has — Jules at breakfast with jam on his nose, Jules asleep with his elephant tucked under his chin, Jules in the bath holding up a plastic dinosaur for the camera. Each photo is a small wound. She has watched the press conference video so many times that she knows every pause, every word, every moment where Dominic’s composure holds and every moment where it almost doesn’t.
He fought for her. Publicly. Vulnerably. Stood in front of cameras and said her name and meant it.
And she ran.
She is sitting on the edge of her childhood bed, phone in her lap, re-watching it for the fifteenth time when her mother appears in the doorway.
Lita Rivera is a small woman with strong hands and the particular stillness of someone who has spent decades absorbing other people’s crises without flinching. She takes in the scene — her daughter, the tear-streaked face, the phone — and crosses the room to sit beside her. The bed frame creaks. Outside the window, a neighbor’s rooster is making noise about something.
“Anak,” her mother says. The word for child, the word that still softens something in Valencia’s chest no matter how old she gets. “You need to decide. Stay here and heal. Or go back to him.”
“I can’t go back. The scandal—”
“Is over. He fixed it. Defended you.” Her mother sets a warm hand on Valencia’s knee. “The news here says society believes him now. You are not the villain anymore.”
“But his mother—”
“Will accept you or lose her son. He chose you, Valencia. Publicly. In front of cameras.” Her mother’s voice is quiet and direct. “The question is not whether he loves you. The question is whether you choose him.”
Valencia opens her mouth. Closes it.
She doesn’t have an answer. She has fear, thick and tangled — fear that the scandal will revive, fear that Genevieve St. Clair will find another way to hurt them, fear that loving Dominic means spending the rest of her life waiting for the next disaster. Fear that she is too tired, too ordinary, too much from a different world to survive in his.
Her mother looks at her a long moment, then squeezes her knee and stands. She doesn’t push. She knows her daughter.
The doorbell rings.
From downstairs, her father’s voice carries up through the small house: “Valencia! May taong gustong makita ka!”
Someone here to see you.
“Sino?” she calls back.
“Bumaba ka na!”
Come see.
She pulls herself off the bed, smoothing her hair without thinking about it, and walks down the narrow staircase. The living room is dim, curtains half-drawn against the midday heat, the familiar arrangement of the sofa and the shelving unit with family photos exactly as it has been her entire life.
And in the middle of it, looking entirely out of place and entirely determined, is Dominic St. Clair.
Valencia stops on the last step.
He’s not wearing a suit. That’s the first thing she registers — some part of her brain noting the wrongness and rightness of it simultaneously. Jeans and a plain dark t-shirt, slightly rumpled, like he dressed without thinking or didn’t sleep on the flight. His hair is not perfectly styled. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there two weeks ago. He looks like a man who flew halfway around the world because he decided he was going to, and gave very little thought to anything else.
He looks terrified.
He looks desperately, carefully hopeful.
“Hi,” he says.
Valencia becomes aware that her parents are watching from the kitchen doorway. That two of her aunts — who were apparently visiting, because someone must have told them something — are visible through the bedroom hallway. That the house, always porous with family, has collected more witnesses than usual.
“What — how — why are you here?” she manages.
“Fighting for you.”
The aunts murmur something in Tagalog. Her father makes a sound that isn’t quite a word.
Dominic’s gaze flickers briefly to the assembled family and back to her. “Can we talk? Privately?”
She leads him to the small balcony off the side of the house — a concrete slab with a plastic table and two chairs, a string of lights she helped her father hang three years ago, a view of the narrow street and the neighbor’s papaya tree. The heat is thick and immediate out here, different from New York heat, carrying the smell of frangipani from somewhere down the block and faintly, beneath that, the salt-and-motor-oil scent of a city near the water.
She closes the sliding door behind them.
“You came to the Philippines,” Valencia says, not a question, still processing it as a physical fact.
Dominic faces her. He doesn’t make any move to touch her, doesn’t close the distance between them — just stands there with his hands at his sides, present and open.
“I was supposed to do this first. Before the press conference. Come here. Meet your family. Show you I’m serious. I did it backwards.” He exhales. “I’m correcting that now.”
“You flew halfway around the world—”
“To show you I choose you. Over convenience. Over comfort. Over pride. Over the seventeen easier options I had available.” His voice is even, but there is something raw beneath it, the way a wound sounds when someone is trying very hard not to flinch. “Over everything.”
“Dom—”
“Let me finish. Please.” He takes a breath. “I messed up. I let the scandal happen, let my mother hurt you, didn’t fight hard enough when you were walking out the door. I gave a press conference — I stood there in front of cameras and said my piece — but I didn’t do the personal part. I didn’t show up here. Didn’t stand in front of your family the way I should have. Didn’t show them, show you, that I will meet you where you are. Not ask you to always meet me.” He pauses. “So I’m here. In the Philippines. Ready to meet your grandmother and all twelve of your cousins or however many there are. Ready to eat whatever your aunts put in front of me and answer whatever your father wants to ask. Ready to be uncomfortable and out of my element and prove that this is real.”
He steps forward slightly — not crowding her, just closing the distance to something human.
“I love you. And I’m done proving it only in the places where it’s easy for me.”
Valencia is crying. She didn’t decide to, it just happened somewhere in the middle of that, tears sliding hot down her face in the afternoon heat.
“You left Jules—”
“With Ethan and my mother. They’re watching him together.” He says it with the particular expression of a man who finds this both alarming and overdue. “They’re bonding. Learning to manage a five-year-old in the same space. It’s terrifying and probably necessary.”
“Your mother?”
“She apologized. While you were gone — actually apologized, Valencia, which I don’t think I have seen her do in my lifetime, not like this. Spending time alone with Jules, without me there as a buffer, without her usual social scaffolding — she saw what she almost destroyed. She’s trying. For Jules. For me.” He meets her eyes. “And eventually, for you. I won’t pretend it’s fixed. But it’s real.”
Valencia presses her fingers against her mouth. Her chest feels like something in it is deciding whether to break or open.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll give me another chance. Say you believe me. Say you’ll come home.”
“My family — they were ashamed—”
“Your mother called me.” He watches her face as this lands. “Three days ago. Told me to come here. To fight for you properly instead of sending messages you weren’t reading. Your father gave me the address and told me which hotel not to stay at because the air conditioning doesn’t work.” Something flickers in his expression — almost a smile, brief and warm. “They’re not ashamed of you. They’re watching through the glass door right now to see whether I’m serious.”
Valencia turns her head. Through the sliding door, the kitchen is indeed occupied by more people than it was before.
She turns back to him.
“They want me to go back?”
“They want you to be happy. And you’re not happy here. Not the way you should be.” He says it gently, without accusation. “Maria has been keeping me informed. She told me you cry in the mornings. That you watch the press conference video on repeat. That you keep your phone face-up on the table like you’re waiting for something.”
“Damn Maria,” Valencia says, though her voice comes out broken instead of wry.
“Wonderful, interfering Maria,” Dominic agrees softly.
A moment passes between them. On the street below, a tricycle rattles by, the engine sound fading into the general hum of the neighborhood — children somewhere, a television through an open window, the papaya tree’s leaves moving in a small warm breeze.
Valencia takes a breath.
“Come inside,” she finally says. “Meet my family properly.”
They go back through the sliding door.
The living room has expanded in their absence. More chairs have appeared, rearranged. Her grandmother is seated in the place of greatest visibility near the window — tiny and upright in her eighty-something years, wearing a house dress and holding the rosary she has carried through everything. Aunts and uncles positioned at intervals around the room. Cousins in the hallway trying to look casual and failing entirely. Her parents standing together near the kitchen.
Dominic walks in and faces all of it.
He doesn’t look away, doesn’t reach for social authority or the particular upper-class composure Valencia has seen him deploy in boardrooms. He just stands there, straight, visible, with his hands at his sides.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rivera,” he begins. “I’m Dominic. I’m in love with your daughter.”
“We know who you are,” her father says. His voice carries the measured weight of a man who has been assembling his response for two weeks. “The newspapers told us.”
“The newspapers lied. Or told half a story. Yes — Valencia and I started with an arrangement. A practical agreement that suited us both.” He speaks clearly, making no effort to soften the admission. “But we fell in love for real. My feelings for her are genuine and they have been for a long time. She is the best person I know. The most patient, the most steady, the most genuinely good. And I failed to protect that.”
“You let your mother ruin her reputation,” Valencia’s mother says. Not unkindly, but without softening it either.
“I did. I spent two weeks after she left trying to repair the public part of that damage. But the more important failure was before the scandal ever broke — I should have stopped it. Should have seen what my mother was doing and confronted it earlier. Should have made clear, to everyone, what Valencia means to me. I didn’t, and she paid for that.” He pauses. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix shame,” her father says.
“No. But action does.” Dominic looks at her father directly. “I’m here. In your home. Asking for your blessing. Asking for another chance to love your daughter properly — to be worthy of her, to build something real with her. I know that’s not a small thing to ask.”
Her grandmother speaks.
She does it without preamble, the way very old people sometimes do, as though they have earned the right to skip to the center of things. Her voice is small and precise.
“You are rich. She is not. That is a problem.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Dominic says, and he says it to her directly, with the attention she is owed. “I’ll sign whatever she needs signed. Ensure she has financial independence, her own power in the relationship, her own security. I don’t want her money. She doesn’t have much, and that has never been relevant to me for a single moment. I want her.”
“You have a son,” one of the aunts says from across the room.
“Jules. He’s five. He loves Valencia more than almost anything.” A brief tightness crosses his face, gone quickly. “He’s been crying every day since she left. He keeps asking when she’s coming home.”
Something in Valencia shifts. Breaks loose from wherever she’d been holding it.
Jules crying. Jules asking. Jules waiting with his stuffed elephant in the penthouse that feels too quiet without her.
“You left him,” she says quietly, “to come here.”
“For a week. To stand in front of your family and show them what I should have shown them before any of this happened.” He looks at her, and everything else in the room falls slightly away. “Then we all go home together. If you’ll come.”
The room is quiet, watching her.
Every face she has known her entire life, arranged around her, waiting. This is the texture of Filipino family — there is no such thing as a private decision, not really, because you are made of these people and they are part of every choice whether you name them or not.
“I need to think,” Valencia says. Her voice is steadier than she feels. “I just — I need a moment.”
Dominic nods immediately. No argument, no pressure.
“I’m staying at the hotel on Mabini. Here’s the address.” He produces a card, sets it on the table near the door. “When you’re ready, I’ll be there. I’m not going anywhere.”
He says goodbye to her parents — formally, carefully — and lets himself out. The door closes behind him.
For one second, the room holds its breath.
Then everyone speaks at once.
“He came all this way—”
“That man is serious, anak—”
“He looked you in the eye, he didn’t look away—”
“But the scandal—”
“He fixed the scandal, did you not listen—”
“But his mother—”
“His mother apologized! You heard him—”
“But what if—”
“What if you’re happy?” Her grandmother’s voice cuts clean through everything, the room falling silent around it. She hasn’t moved from her chair, still holding the rosary, still watching Valencia with those sharp, unhurried eyes. “What if this works? What if love is enough?”
Valencia stands in the middle of all of them, in the small bright living room of the house she grew up in, with the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead and the street noise coming through the walls and the papaya tree moving in the heat outside.
She spends the night in her childhood bed, not sleeping much.
She lies there with the lights off, tracing the cracks in the familiar ceiling, and she thinks about Dominic standing in her parents’ living room with his hands at his sides, looking more exposed than she has ever seen him in any boardroom or press conference or private moment between them. She thinks about Jules asking when she’s coming home. She thinks about her grandmother’s voice, cutting through the noise to ask the only question that matters.
What if love is enough?
By the time the light starts coming through the curtains — gray first, then gold, the morning sounds of the neighborhood assembling themselves — she knows.
She loves Dominic. She has loved him long enough that it has become structural, something load-bearing in how she moves through the world. She loves Jules with a completeness that surprised her the first time she felt it clearly and has only grown since. She wants that life — the penthouse kitchen in the early mornings, Jules at the table with his drawing, the three of them navigating something real and difficult and beautiful together.
And Dominic flew halfway around the world to prove he’s serious.
Time to be equally serious.
Time to choose love.
Time to go home.
The hotel is modest and clean, set back from a busy street behind a small parking area. A dog sleeps in a patch of shade near the entrance. Valencia stands outside the door to room 12 for a moment, ring finger bare where the sunlight falls on her hand, and then she knocks.
He opens the door immediately — still dressed, like maybe he didn’t sleep either.
Hope and fear do something complicated to his face. He doesn’t move to reach for her, doesn’t try to close the distance. Just stands there and lets her see him.
“Hi,” Valencia says.
“Hi.”
“You came to the Philippines.”
“I did.”
“You met my family.”
“I did. Your grandmother asked me very pointed questions about financial prenuptial arrangements. Your father wants to know my credit history. Your aunt Mila fed me three servings of sinigang.”
Valencia’s mouth curves despite herself. “You’re staying in a cheap hotel instead of a resort.”
He glances briefly at the room behind him — twin beds, a window unit rattling against the heat, a ceiling light without a shade. “Didn’t feel right to be comfortable when I’m fighting for you.”
Valencia steps forward.
She crosses the threshold and stops just in front of him, close enough that she can see the exact color of his eyes in the morning light, close enough that she can feel the warmth coming off him, close enough for this to mean something.
“I love you,” she says. “I never stopped. Even when I left. Even when I was hurt and scared and convinced I was doing the right thing by walking away.” She exhales slowly. “I love you, Dominic. And I want to come home.”
His eyes fill. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink it back.
“To you. To Jules. To whatever complicated, imperfect, wonderful thing we’re building together.” She reaches up and presses her hand flat against his chest, feeling the thump of his heart. “I want our family.”
“Yeah?” he says, and his voice is rough.
“Yeah. If you’ll have me.”
“Valencia.” He brings his hands up to hold her face, very carefully, like she might be something he has been afraid of breaking. “If I’ll have you. You’re everything. You have no idea — you are absolutely everything. Of course I’ll have you. Forever.”
He kisses her.
After two weeks of absence and pain and separation, after the scandal and the press conference and the flight across fourteen time zones and the conversation in her parents’ living room — after all of it — he kisses her, and it is not a grand romantic gesture, it is simply two people choosing each other in a cheap hotel room in the Philippines at seven in the morning, and it is perfect.
Everything Valencia needed.
Everything she ran from.
Everything she is choosing now.
When they finally break apart, her forehead drops to his shoulder. He wraps his arms around her and pulls her in, and they stand like that for a long time — just present with each other, breathing, home.
“Take me home,” she says eventually, her voice muffled against his shirt.
“Gladly. God, gladly.”
They don’t leave immediately. Valencia’s parents insist on two more days — there is dinner to prepare, goodbyes to be said properly, and her father has a list of things he wants to say to Dominic that would be rude to abbreviate. Her mother packs a bag of food for the flight that Dominic accepts with genuine gratitude and Valencia accepts with the resigned affection of someone who knows exactly how this family operates.
They fly back to New York two days later, the five of them — Dominic, Valencia, and her parents, her mother and father wanting to see where their daughter lives, to meet Jules properly, to assure themselves with their own eyes that she is going to be all right.
JFK is what it always is: vast and fluorescent and slightly chaotic, the smell of jet fuel and fast food and ten thousand people moving in different directions. They come through arrivals and Valencia scans the waiting crowd.
Ethan is there, near the barriers. And beside him, bouncing on his heels in the particular full-body way that five-year-olds do when they cannot contain themselves, holding his stuffed elephant and wearing the dinosaur shirt Valencia bought him in September — Jules.
He sees her before she’s close enough, and he doesn’t walk.
He runs.
“VAL! You came back! You CAME BACK!”
She drops to her knees right there in the middle of the arrivals hall, heedless of the luggage and the people and her parents watching with their own wet eyes, and she catches him, pulling him in tight. He wraps his arms around her neck with that particular Jules-grip, fierce and complete, his stuffed elephant pressed between them.
“I’m so sorry I left, sweetheart.” Her voice breaks and she doesn’t try to fix it. “I’m back now. I’m staying.”
Jules pulls back just enough to look at her face with great seriousness. “Forever?”
“Forever.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He considers this, and then something in his face releases — the tight worried thing he’d been carrying, the question he’d been holding for two weeks — and he tucks his head back against her shoulder.
She becomes aware of Dominic behind her, close, and then his arms come around both of them — warm and solid, completing the circle.
Her parents are beside Ethan now. Her mother is pretending to look for something in her bag. Her father has his hand pressed over his heart.
This, Valencia thinks. This is what it feels like.
Not perfect. Not without complications — the mother-in-law who is learning, the scandal still fading from the gossip columns, the two worlds they are still learning to build a bridge between. But real. Fought for. Chosen.
Love that was worth the flight across the world, worth the hotel room with the broken ceiling fan, worth standing in a living room in Manila and letting people who had every reason to be skeptical look at you and decide.
She holds Jules and lets Dominic hold both of them, right there in the middle of JFK, and she thinks: worth it.
All of it.
Worth everything.
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