Episode 26: The Call to Cabanatuan.

Previously on the Chicken Chronicles... E came upstairs herself, at last — small, precise, carrying a canvas bag that had crossed a lot of provinces. She wouldn't give up the name behind the 2012 letter theft, not yet, but she left with two things planted in the room: a scar on her own wrist, semicircle, decades older than Mayen's — and five words for Chester. *Call your mother before Sunday.*

Episode 26: The Call to Cabanatuan

Chester held the phone for 11 minutes before he dialed anything.

Henrietta didn't ask what he was doing. She sat across the kitchen table peeling a calamansi with her thumbnail, not looking up, which was its own kind of company.

"She's going to ask why I'm calling on a Tuesday," Chester said.

"Then tell her."

"I don't know what E knows that she doesn't."

"Neither do you know what your mother knows that E doesn't." Henrietta set the peel down in one long curl. "Call her, Chester."

He called her.

Nanay Fely picked up on the fourth ring, the way she always did, like answering too fast was undignified. In the background: a jeepney horn, someone's radio playing an old Freddie Aguilar song, the particular clatter of Cabanatuan's public market at whatever hour it was there.

"Anak. Why are you calling me on a Tuesday."

"I talked to someone last night. She said I should call you before Sunday. She said —" Chester stopped, started again. "She said you'd know part of it already."

The line went quiet except for the market noise. Long enough that Chester checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.

"Her name," Nanay Fely said finally. "Not yours. Hers. What did she look like."

"Small. Hair pulled back. A scar on her wrist — here." He touched his own forearm without thinking. "Semicircle. Old."

Another silence, shorter this time, and different — not searching, landing.

"Come to Cabanatuan," his mother said. "Bring Henrietta. Don't bring the letter — leave it wherever you've been keeping it safe. And anak — when you get here, don't ask me about Estrella first. Ask me about your Tita Puring. That's the door this actually opens through."

"I don't have a Tita Puring."

"You do," his mother said. "You just never needed to."

She hung up before he could ask anything else, which was, Chester thought, exactly the kind of thing E would do.

Henrietta had gone still across the table, calamansi forgotten.

"Tita Puring," she said. "That's not a name in any of it. Not the letters, not Gregory's pages, not the Dapitan folder."

"That's the point, I think." Chester turned the phone over in his hands like it might have more to say. "My mother's been sitting on a name nobody's asked her for yet."

"Or she's been sitting on it because nobody was allowed to ask." Henrietta finally ate the calamansi, whole, sour enough to make her wince. "Your mother knew Estrella. Now there's a Tita Puring nobody's heard of, on your mother's side, opening a door your mother specifically didn't want you walking through the front of." She looked at him. "That's not a family friend, Chester. That's a second thread."

"Two threads."

"Two threads that are about to become one, in Cabanatuan, this weekend." Henrietta stood and started clearing the table, which was what she did instead of saying she was worried. "We should leave Friday. Beat the Saturday market traffic on the highway."

"And the letter?"

"Stays here. Your mother was specific." Henrietta paused at the sink, back to him. "Chester. When E said 'I already know part of what she'll say' — she wasn't talking about the mystery. She was talking about your mother, specifically, like she already knows her too."

Chester hadn't thought of it that way. Now he couldn't think of it any other way.

They left at 6:40 Friday morning, the highway still cool, sacks of watermelon stacked at every roadside stall past San Jose. Cabanatuan was 108 kilometers out — just under 2 hours if the Cabiao junction stayed clear. Chester drove. Henrietta had the window down, elbow out, watching the rice fields go from green to gold and back to green as the road climbed and dropped.

Two hours out from Cabanatuan, Chester's phone buzzed on the dash. Unknown number. Not a +63 77 prefix this time — a 044, Nueva Ecija's own.

He looked at Henrietta. She looked at the road.

"Answer it," she said.

He answered it. A woman's voice, older than E's, unhurried in a different way — tired-unhurried, not careful-unhurried.

"Chester? This is Puring. Your mother said you were coming. Before you get here — there's something in this house that's older than the letters, older than Gregory, and it's got your name in it too. Not just hers."

The line held a beat of market noise, the same kind that had been behind his mother's voice, and then Tita Puring said the thing that made Henrietta finally turn from the window.

"You should know it's not just Gregory who went looking for the right person. Your family's been looking for forty years."

Next week on the Chicken Chronicles: Cabanatuan, Tita Puring's house, and the name your family's been keeping since before Chester was hatched.