The second email arrived at 6:43 a.m.
Lam Hy was brushing her teeth. Her phone vibrated on the sink, and she glanced down reflexively—then went still. The toothbrush remained in her mouth. Her eyes stopped on the sender's name and refused to read any farther right away, the eyes of someone who knew the contents wouldn't be pleasant and was putting it off for a few more seconds.
Tran Da Kham.
Not the office. Not an assistant or secretary or anyone else paid to send emails on his behalf. His name, his personal address, and a blank subject line.
She spat out the toothpaste, wiped her mouth, and picked up the phone.
Can you come to my office at 3:00 p.m. today? The 18th floor. Private elevator; your access card has been authorized.
That was it. No greeting. No signature. Not a word explaining why, what the meeting was for, or what they needed to discuss. The kind of email written by someone who wasn't used to explaining—or didn't consider explanations necessary—because no one had ever asked him to justify himself.
She read it again. Then once more. She set the phone back on the sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was a mess, the pillow crease still red on her left cheek, and her left eye wasn't fully open. She'd slept for four hours—more than she'd expected, but four hours of restless sleep, jolting awake every time she was about to sink under, not because of a nightmare or any particular noise, just the feeling that something remained unfinished. Something hovering somewhere in her mind, refusing to let go.
The 18th floor.
Back when she worked at Minh Chau Publishing, she would occasionally ride the elevator with people from other companies in the building and hear them talk about that floor. Restricted. Not everyone could get in. Even the building's employees didn't know how many rooms were up there, who came and went, or what they did. She had never known anyone who'd been up there.
And he had sent her an access card.
Without asking. Without waiting for her agreement. He'd sent it as if whether she came or not had already been decided, and she simply hadn't known yet—and whether she knew or not wouldn't really change anything.
She turned on the faucet, washed her face, and left the bathroom.
An envelope lay beneath the door.
She discovered it at seven-thirty, when she was about to go out for bread. She opened the door, looked down, and stopped. A white envelope with no name and no stamp. She picked it up and turned it over—thin, slightly stiff, with something rectangular inside.
She tore it open.
A dark blue access card, bearing nothing but a string of numbers and the Ky Nguyen Group logo in the lower corner. The printing was crisp, not something thrown together in a hurry.
She stood in the doorway, card in hand, looking out at the eerily empty apartment-building hallway in the early morning. The faint smell of coffee drifted from the unit across the hall. The hall lights were still on, pale yellow spilling across the tile floor.
He knew her home address.
Not her company address. Not her registered administrative address. Her home—the seventh-floor apartment in an ordinary apartment building in Dong Da District, a place no one would know without deliberately looking for it.
She stepped inside and closed the door.
She set the card on the kitchen table. Poured coffee into a mug—she'd brewed it as soon as she woke up, out of habit, her hands working while her mind was still only half-awake. She sat down and looked at the card.
The small Ky Nguyen Group logo sat in the lower right corner. The string of numbers meant nothing to her. Dark blue background, ink that hadn't bled, evenly rounded corners.
Not something someone had ordered overnight.
Which meant that before he sent the email—before she knew she'd be invited to the 18th floor—the card had already existed.
She lifted her coffee, took a sip, and let the heat fade on its own without blowing on it. She looked out the window. The sky was still murky, the kind of murky morning that hadn't decided whether the day would be sunny.
3:00 p.m.
She arrived at 2:58.
It was a habit she couldn't shake—Lam Hy was never late, not even to appointments she wasn't entirely sure she should attend. Standing in the elevator lobby of Section B, she swiped the card exactly as instructed in the email. The light turned green. The doors opened.
Inside was different from the building's regular elevators. It was wider, paneled in dark wood, with no music and none of the synthetic hotel-perfume smell luxury elevators tended to spray. Only the scent of wood and cold air, the kind of cold produced by an air conditioner that ran constantly without ever shutting off.
She stepped inside. The doors closed.
Her reflection appeared in the glossy wood panels—white shirt, black pants, hair tied low. She'd changed three times before leaving home. The first outfit was too formal, the second made her look like she was going to an interview, and the third was this one—the most ordinary, with no particular effort behind it. Then she'd stood in front of the mirror for another five minutes before leaving because there was no time to change again.
She didn't understand why she'd changed three times for this meeting.
Or maybe she did. She just didn't want to admit it.
Ding.
The doors opened.
There was no receptionist. No hallway or waiting area furnished with sofas and magazines like a corporate lobby. Just a large open space with a high ceiling and natural light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows along one entire wall. She stepped out of the elevator, the doors closing behind her, and stood still, looking around.
Wood floors. Bookshelves lining the opposite wall—not decorative shelves, the kind people filled to look nice and never touched. The books weren't perfectly aligned. One had been pulled out and laid horizontally, a bookmark sticking out, multicolored spines crammed together in no particular order. In the middle of the room stood a large desk with two monitors and papers scattered in a way that was messy but systematic—not disorderly, just not cleaned up.
No one was there.
She stepped farther inside. The wood gave a soft creak beneath her feet.
Then footsteps came from deeper inside—the door on the left, which she hadn't noticed when she first entered. Footsteps even and unhurried across the wooden floor.
Tran Da Kham came out.
No suit today. A black dress shirt, sleeves rolled to mid-forearm. He looked at her without speaking right away—not the look of someone surprised by a visitor, but the look of someone who knew his visitor would arrive on time and was confirming his prediction.
She kept her expression neutral.
He walked toward the desk, pulled out the chair beside it—not the chair at the head, but the one beside it, the place for someone actually working rather than meeting a guest—and sat down. He gestured toward the chair opposite him.
She pulled it out and sat.
The distance between them was the width of the desk. Neither far nor close. Close enough for her to notice—when he placed his hand on the desk—that his left wrist had no cufflink.
A flesh-colored bandage. Neat. Invisible to anyone who didn't know to look.
Her eyes paused there.
Half a second. Maybe less.
When she looked up, he was looking at her.
Neither of them said anything.
She opened her mouth—then closed it and changed course. “I've reviewed the materials you sent.”
“And?”
“And—” She placed her hands on the desk. “I have some thoughts on the department merger.”
“Go ahead.”
She spoke. She didn't look at notes because she hadn't brought any—she'd read and reread the materials from morning until now, and the numbers, names, and organizational structure were already in her head. She didn't need paper. Keeping sixty percent of the old staff—fine, reasonable, no objections. Restructuring the two departments—also fine, she understood the logic. But merging editorial and distribution—
“Those two departments don't operate on the same rhythm,” she said. “Editorial works according to manuscript cycles, which can take several months for a single book, and the schedule isn't consistent. Distribution is the opposite—hard deadlines, printing and distribution schedules that can't be moved. Putting both under one manager—” She paused. “It's not impossible. But there will be friction during the first six months. A lot of it.”
He remained silent as she spoke. He didn't nod, take notes, or put on the expression of someone listening out of politeness. He simply looked straight at her, and that gaze—focused in a way that missed no word—made her work to keep from speaking faster than usual.
“What specifically will cause the friction?” It wasn't quite a question. More like a demand.
“The editors will think distribution is pressuring them. Distribution will think editorial is slow. The two sides will blame each other when they miss deadlines—and they will miss them. The first phase will inevitably involve several missed deadlines. Then the shared manager will have to deal with internal issues instead of focusing on the product.” She stopped. “Minh Chau Publishing tried merging them in 2019. They split them up again after eight months.”
Silence.
“You remember those numbers.”
“I was there.” She said, “I was the one who had to run around apologizing to two authors because their book launches were pushed back.”
He looked at her a little longer—not evaluatively, but in some other way she couldn't name—then tapped one finger lightly against the desk.
“Fine. Keep the two departments separate.”
She hadn't expected him to agree so quickly. She didn't let it show—or at least, she didn't think she did.
“What about the rest of the materials?” he asked.
“The rest…” She reviewed it in her head. “Basically sound.”
“Basically.”
He repeated the word. He didn't emphasize it or sound sarcastic—but something in the way he said it told her he was asking about the part that wasn't sound, the part she hadn't said outright.
“The box for the person in charge.” She said, “You left it blank.”
“Yeah.”
“You're proposing me for it.”
He didn't answer immediately. Afternoon light streamed through the windows, long and slanted, laying a pale gold streak across the desk between them. The city outside was moving—she knew because she could see it through the glass—but she couldn't hear anything. The windows were well insulated, or the floor was high enough that the noise couldn't reach it.
“You think I'm proposing you.”
“If you weren't, why leave it blank?”
“To see if you'd notice.”
Lam Hy looked at him.
That answer—
She didn't know what to do with it. Was it a challenge? An admission? Both at once, in the way that even the most direct answer could still leave something unsaid? After speaking, he looked at her with an unchanged expression and waited—and it wasn't the waiting of someone anxious. It was the waiting of someone who already knew how she'd react and was checking whether he was right.
“Then can I know why?” She kept her voice even. “Why me?”
“You answered that question yourself yesterday.”
“Archiving system, authors, training time.” She nodded. “But those are reasons to keep me. Not reasons to put me in that position.”
He was silent. The silence of someone who had an answer but was weighing it.
“Do you know the difference between a good manuscript reader and a good editor?”
She didn't answer. She waited.
“A good reader sees what the author wrote.” He braced one hand on the desk. “A good editor sees what the author wants to write but hasn't been able to.”
She looked at him. “Which of my manuscripts did you read?”
Silence.
She asked the question and immediately realized she was waiting for the answer with more attention than usual—her back had straightened slightly, and her left hand had tightened beneath the desk without her noticing until her fingers began to ache.
He didn't answer in words.
He stood and walked toward the bookshelves. She followed him with her eyes—his steps were more normal than the night before, without the heavy slowness of someone forcing himself not to fall, but his left shoulder was still slightly lower than his right. That small unevenness was still there.
He took something from the shelf. Then he returned and set it on the desk in front of her.
She looked down.
A manuscript. A4 paper, softcover binding, the edges slightly yellowed. The cover bore handwriting in blue ink, slanted and quickly written.
Those Who Stayed—third draft, August.
She looked at the cover and didn't understand.
Not because she didn't recognize it—she knew this book too well. The author, writing under the pen name Minh Ngoc, had submitted the manuscript to Minh Chau Publishing through an anonymous email, with no photo or information, only one short sentence attached to the file. She had been the first reader. She'd called the director at ten that night. She'd persuaded the board through three rounds of meetings. She'd edited every page for more than four months. The book had launched the previous year and sold out during its first week.
But this wasn't a printed copy. This was the third draft—the copy she'd printed out to work on, marked discreetly in red pen, covered in dense notes along the margins, with several pages folded at the corners.
This copy had only ever been on her desk.
The desk she'd cleared out last night.
She looked at the cover. At the handwriting on it. At the blue ink stain in the corner—she remembered that stain. During editing, she often held a pen while she read. That time, the pen had leaked, leaving a small blot in the corner. She'd meant to print a new cover but had been too lazy.
Her hand rested on the desk. It didn't move.
“This…”
She meant to ask where this had come from—but the words reached the tip of her tongue and stopped, because her mind was moving faster than her mouth, adding two and two, remembering last night in the basement, the three cardboard boxes, and the time between when she stepped out of the elevator and when she drove away.
She raised her head.
“Where did you get this?”
Her voice was flatter than she'd expected.
“You left it behind.”
She looked at him.
“I didn't leave it behind.”
“Or dropped it.”
“I didn't—” She stopped and drew a breath. “This manuscript was in the second box. I remember clearly. I put it in the box myself.”
He said nothing.
She looked at him, trying to fit the pieces together—the access card beneath her door, her home address, the elevator last night, the time between when she'd stepped out and when she'd driven out of the basement. Four or five minutes. She'd stacked the boxes, walked to the parking spot, put them in the trunk, checked again, and closed the trunk.
The trunk hadn't locked right away. She remembered having to press the lock button a second time because it hadn't caught the first time.
Enough time for someone who knew what they were doing.
“You got into my car.” She spoke more slowly now. “Or one of your people did.”
Tran Da Kham neither confirmed nor denied it. He sat there looking at her with the same unchanged expression he'd worn since she entered the room.
She stood.
Not abruptly, not springing up in anger. She rose normally, pushed the chair in, and placed a hand on its back.
“You know my home address.” She listed each thing one by one, her voice level. “You have a manuscript taken from my car. You sent the access card before I received the email—which means the card had already been made.” She looked directly at him. “How long have you been watching me?”
The room was silent.
Beyond the windows, the afternoon light had shifted to pale orange, stretching across the wood floor, the desk, and his left wrist—the flesh-colored bandage stood out clearly in the golden light, more clearly than when she'd first entered.
Tran Da Kham looked at her.
This time, longer than before.
“Sit down, Lam Hy.”
“I won't—”
“I'm not finished.”
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't threaten her. It was simply the statement of someone unaccustomed to being interrupted and with no need to use his tone to make that clear.
She stood still.
She didn't sit. But she didn't leave, either.
He pulled out his chair and sat down, placing his hand on the desk—his left hand, the bandage directly in front of her, closer than before.
“You want to know how long I've been watching you.” His voice was flat. “That's not the right question.”
She looked at him. “What's the right question?”
He looked straight at her.
“Why did I stop?”
She left at 4:50.
She rode the elevator down alone, with no music. She stood looking at herself in the glossy wood paneling—her hair still tied low, white shirt, nothing different from when she'd gone up—and thought of nothing. Or tried not to think, but that sentence remained there, refusing to leave.
Why did I stop?
The meeting ended without any further answer. After that sentence, he didn't explain or elaborate. He only pushed the documents across the desk, asked her a few questions about the current catalog, and told her she'd receive a new contract tomorrow. Ordinary. Professional. As if he'd never said the sentence, and she hadn't asked again because—because what? She didn't know. Something about that moment had kept her from asking, and now, alone in the descending elevator, she no longer understood why.
Ding. Ground-floor lobby.
She stepped out, passed through the glass doors, and stopped on the sidewalk. The afternoon wind blew along the street, carrying exhaust mixed with the musty smell of wet trees—a light rain had fallen that morning, unnoticed by her.
She opened her bag to get her keys.
Her hand stopped.
Inside the bag—between her wallet, keys, and lipstick case—was a piece of paper. Small, folded into quarters. She hadn't put it there. She was certain. She used this bag every day; she knew what was inside it.
She took it out and unfolded it.
Handwriting. Blue ink. Slanted, written quickly, with the final strokes of the letters trailing long.
The same handwriting as the cover of Those Who Stayed.
One sentence.
This time, you shouldn't stay alone.
She stood on the sidewalk, the paper in her hand, the wind making its edge flutter softly. Pedestrians passed her, cars moved along the street, and a horn sounded somewhere in the distance.
The sentence wasn't about last night.
It wasn't about the basement, the old company, or anything that had happened over the past two days.
It was about something else.
Something she hadn't told anyone—not friends, not former colleagues, no one. Something she'd decided to bury deep enough that she wouldn't need to remember it anymore.
Tran Da Kham knew about it.
And he'd known before she stepped into the elevator last night.