Evangeline Garcia had learned to draw before she learned to spell her name. Her mother used to call it a blessing, her father a gift. But gifts have teeth, and Evangeline would spend years trying not to bleed.

She was forty-two now, and her pencil was her only constant. Manila pulsed outside the courthouse walls—jeepneys rattling along Taft Avenue, vendors shouting over traffic, the smell of roasted peanuts cutting through diesel fumes. Inside, everything was cold, gray, still. Marble tiles swallowed voices. The only sound was the scratch of her pencil on paper.

Faces. That was her life. Translating men into lines, giving shape to guilt before a judge declared it.

Some defendants smiled at her sketches, proud even. Others avoided her eyes as though her pencil carried the weight of God. And maybe, in a way, it did.

Because the first time she made the eyes sharp and cruel—like her sister Katherine’s killer—the jury shifted in their seats. The whispers grew teeth. The verdict came back: guilty. No evidence, no fingerprints, nothing but the face she’d drawn. And she told herself it wasn’t her doing. It was the truth surfacing through her hands.

She clung to that. For years, she clung.

—

Katherine’s laugh still lived in her. That thin, bell-like sound they shared as girls running barefoot through their lola’s mango orchard in Cavite. Then one night, Katherine didn’t come home. They found her body a week later in a ditch off Roxas Boulevard. No one was arrested. No face to name. Just silence and the smell of salt in the air.

So Evangeline started giving faces to monsters. Over time, they blurred together—cheekbones sharpened, jaws clenched, eyes that glimmered with something rotten. All of them bore traces of the man who killed Katherine, though she never saw him, never knew him.

Until James Calub.

—

James had kind eyes. Tired, soft. He wore a barong tagalog that day, still smelling faintly of starch and prayer. He nodded at her as he took his seat. He looked like someone’s uncle, someone who’d peel green mangoes in the shade and dip them in salt. But when her pencil touched paper, her hand betrayed her. The eyes came first, narrow, sinister. Her grip tightened.

The jury never saw James the man. They saw James the drawing.

—

Months later, the real killer was found. The court issued an apology. Too late for James, who died with rosary beads in his hands and his children’s names in his mouth.

Evangeline tried to swallow the guilt. It lodged like fish bones in her throat.

—

Then the knocking began.

At first, she thought it was nothing. Just a branch scraping the window during a typhoon night. Then came the smell—sampaguita and burnt candle wax, like a wake that never ended. Shadows lingered too long. In mirrors, she saw James standing behind her, his white barong glowing like salt-streaked linen. His mouth didn’t move. His eyes did.

She dreamt of him at first. Then she stopped sleeping altogether.

When she walked home through Quiapo’s narrow streets, she felt footsteps matching hers. She left food offerings outside the door. Left whispered apologies under her breath during novenas at Baclaran Church. Nothing eased it.

Until one night, she heard his voice.

It was not angry. Just sighs of disappointment.

—

James could not kill her. Even as a ghost, he was still a good man. But his presence hollowed her out, carving her from the inside like an artisan shaping santo statues.

Evangeline quit the courts. She sold her pencils. She walked through the city like penance, giving alms to every beggar, helping James’ children with their school fees. They never forgave her. She never asked them to.

Because forgiveness was never the point.

The point was to keep her hands from drawing faces.

The point was to stop seeing Katherine killer’s eyes in every man.

The point was to silence the sound of a pencil on paper—a sound that had begun to feel like prayer, and ended like a curse.