THE ESTATE OF SINS: THE SECRET BEHIND THE GREENHOUSE AND THE CHILD WITH THE SCAR OF DESTINY
THE SHADOW IN THE EDEN
PART 1: THE TYRANT IN THE TWILIGHT
I fired Mateo—our aging gardener—because I believed he possessed no further economic value to the family estate. On a wind-swept afternoon at my family’s coffee plantation on the outskirts of Tagaytay, I stood on the veranda, clutching blueprints meant to transform this land of cherished memories into an international-standard luxury eco-resort.
In the mind of a young, ambitious leader like myself, every decision made was absolute truth. And Mateo was the first name that needed to be crossed off the estate’s personnel list.
He had dedicated over twenty years to our family. A quiet man, always hiding his weathered face beneath a tattered sombrero and a frayed, heavily patched jacket. More than once, I had caught him standing motionlessly in the pouring rain just to prop up newly planted stalks of lilies.
My father had once warned me on his deathbed: “When the day comes when you have no one else to trust, Mateo will be the only one you can rely on.”
Yet I never understood that underlying meaning. To a pragmatist like me, he was merely an obsolete remnant of a bygone era—slow and conservative. My patience finally snapped when project progress came to a grinding halt simply because the old man stubbornly insisted on protecting the rotting greenhouse hidden behind the western hill.
“That place is neither safe nor valuable anymore,” I declared coldly during the briefing. “It has to be bulldozed next week.”
Mateo stood quietly in the corner of the room for a long while, his gnarled hands tightly interlocked before he spoke in a raspy voice: — Sir… please, don’t touch that place.
“Why?” I frowned, annoyance starting to build up.
The old man hesitated, his sorrowful gaze piercing through the glass window: — Because… someone still needs its shelter.
I let out a cold, arrogant laugh and turned my back: — I am the one who makes the decisions here, Mateo.
Just three days later, the termination notice was placed on his desk. Not a single plea for mercy, not a single sigh of resentment. Mateo quietly removed his worn leather gloves, placed them neatly on the wooden table, and then looked straight into my eyes with a strange expression: — You will pay a heavy price for this cruelty, Master Mateo Jr.
At that moment, the way he looked at me carried no rage at all; instead, it felt like a gaze of profound pity, as if watching a man eagerly digging his own grave. A surge of fury boiled in my chest, making me want to banish that loathsome old man instantly.
Exactly two hours after signing the papers, while I was surveying the main gates with the engineering team, Mateo’s old, rickety truck slowly rolled out of the estate. Sitting beside him was a young boy.
The child looked to be about seven years old, wearing an oversized outdoor sweater and tightly clutching a frayed, worn-out backpack.
Napakunot-noo ako. I froze. Never in all these years had I ever seen the presence of a child within the boundaries of this estate.
Until the truck paused for a moment and the boy’s eyes locked onto mine.
My heart suddenly seized, my chest hollowed out as if stripped of every last drop of air. All surrounding sounds—from the wind howling through the coffee groves to the distant traffic—instantly vanished.
We shared the exact same eyes. Deep, dark eyes, with the outer corners slightly upturned in quiet pride. Even the structure of the cheekbones, the high bridge of the nose, and the contour of the lips… everything was a flawless replica, a living mirror reflection of my own face when I was seven years old.
But the detail that truly made my blood run cold and paralyzed my entire body was the faint, crescent-shaped scar sitting right above the boy’s left eyebrow. It matched down to the very millimeter with the scar I had carried ever since an ill-fated fall down a flight of stone stairs when I was eight.
I took a step forward, my legs heavy as lead, and stammered out loudly: — Who… who is that child?
Mateo hurriedly reached out to pull the boy’s cap down, partially shielding his face, his voice heavy with fierce vigilance: — It is none of your business. And you had better never look into this ever again.
PART 2: THE SECRET BENEATH THE GREENHOUSE
I stood paralyzed on the spot, staring blankly as the rattling truck carried the two figures away into the distance behind a curve choked with weeds. My mind was an unescapable labyrinth of chaos. Imposible. I had never been married, never engaged in any deep relationship that could have resulted in fatherhood. Why on earth would a flawless clone of myself suddenly appear in this godforsaken place?
Right at that moment, the phone in my pocket suddenly rang, shattering the deathly silence.
Si Inay. (It’s Mother.)
I swiped the screen with trembling hands. Before I could even utter a word, my mother’s frantic, terrified voice on the other end made the blood in my veins feel like it was about to explode: — Have you fired Mateo yet?
I swallowed hard, my throat parched: — Yes… I’ve let him go.
The line fell into a deathly silence for several seconds. Then, my mother’s voice came through, weak and choked with tears, as if confronting a living nightmare: — Did you… did you see the boy who went with him?
I felt my chest tighten, cold sweat pouring down my forehead: — How do you know about that? What are you hiding from me? Who is that child, Mom?
My mother did not answer my question. She began gasping for breath, hurried and panicked sounds echoing through the receiver: — Listen to me… Go after them right now and bring them back! By any means necessary, do not let Mateo take the boy out of Tagaytay!
— Why?! Tell me what is going—
Click… click… click.
The call was abruptly cut off. I screamed my mother’s name into the void, but the phone screen had already gone completely dark. Ignoring the bewildered looks of the engineers around me, I sprinted toward my pickup truck and floored the accelerator straight out onto the main road.
The narrow, fog-veiled, weed-choked road of Tagaytay at dusk suddenly stretched out endlessly. Ahead of me, Mateo’s old truck had long since vanished behind blankets of thick white mist.
Yet my greatest terror did not lie in whether I would find them or not, but in the horrifying truth waiting behind the rotting greenhouse I had once been so determined to bulldoze. A dark intuition screamed inside my head: Mateo was far more than just a gardener… and whatever secrets he harbored inside that greenhouse were going to drag the entire Villanueva dynasty down into an abyss of sin.
