She counted to two hundred and eleven. Then she stood up. She has been standing ever since.
Jonny Tan has survived things that should have unmade him. A childhood sorting trash before dawn in Pampanga. A youth stolen by one wrong calculation. Twenty-three years building other people's cities in Kuwait. A war that took everything - his wife, his daughter, every dollar he had saved. And then, in San Diego at sixty-two, something quieter and harder: no forward motion. Only a cross from his mother's hand in his shirt pocket. Only the next thing, which he cannot yet see.
Tess Reyes has been sufficient since the morning in March 1976 when she was seven years old, sat on a mat, counted to two hundred and eleven, and stood up. She has built a life of such precise structural integrity that it requires nothing external to hold its shape. She is very good at it. She has been practicing for thirty years.
When a letter crosses thirty-seven years of silence, what it delivers is not a reunion. It is something rarer and more costly: a father and daughter discovering they have been speaking the same language, in the same direction, without knowing there was someone on the other end of it.
The Other Side of Far is the prequel to The Same Shore - the story of how Tess Reyes became the woman who gives at three thresholds, who waits, who holds a hand at the edge of water. Read it and you will understand everything that composure cost. Return to Book One after. It will not be the same book.
For readers of Abby Jimenez, Celeste Ng, and Brit Bennett. A slow-burn, literary contemporary romance about a Filipino-American woman, her father, diaspora, family duty, and the love that arrives when you have finally become ready to receive it.
Book Two of The Same Shore Series. Read second. Then reread Book One.
