ST. MALO

THE TREE REMEMBERS EVERY PROMISE. Some promises survive death. Some refuse to be forgotten. 1766. Aboard the Spanish galleon sailing between Manila and Acapulco, a Filipino sailor and a Mexican navigator fall in love. Hunted by the Spanish Empire for a love forbidden by their world, Gabriel de la Cruz and Mateo Álvarez flee into the Louisiana marshes, where the Manilamen-a hidden community of Filipino sailors who escaped from the Spanish galleons-offer them refuge.
Beneath an impossible cacao tree blooming with ghostly white flowers, they make a vow to find one another again-even beyond death. Before dawn, both are lost to history. Or so the world believes. Three centuries later... Lance Mijares, a chocolatier, follows a lifelong devotion to cacao and the ancient civilizations that first revered it as the food of the gods. During a storm-bound layover in New Orleans, he meets Diego Reyes, a Mexican flight attendant whose face seems hauntingly familiar.
From the moment they meet, nightmares begin. As Hurricane Simone closes in on Louisiana, Lance and Diego uncover a legend buried beneath the bayous-a legend tied to love, memory, and the sacred cacao tree. Because something is awakening. And if the tree dies, every promise it has protected for centuries may die with it. Inspired by one of America's most forgotten chapters-the extraordinary true history of the Manilamen, Filipino sailors who escaped from the Spanish galleons sailing between Manila and Acapulco and established one of the earliest Asian settlements in North America, decades before the United States became a nation.