The second email arrived at 6:43 a.m.
Lam Hy was brushing her teeth. Her phone vibrated on the edge of the sink, and she glanced down on instinct—then froze. The toothbrush was still in her mouth. Her eyes stopped on the sender's name and refused to read further right away, the eyes of someone who knew the contents wouldn't be pleasant and delayed 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.
Could you come to my office at three this afternoon? The 18th floor. Private elevator. Your access card has been authorized.
That was it. No greeting. No signature. Not a word explaining why, what they were meeting about, or what needed to be discussed. The kind of email sent by someone unaccustomed to explaining—or who didn't think explanations were necessary—because no one had ever asked him to explain himself.
She read it again. Then once more. After that, she set the phone down on the sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was a mess, the imprint of her pillow still red on her left cheek, her left eye not quite open. She'd slept for four hours—longer than expected, but four hours of restless sleep, jolting awake just as she began to drift off, not because of nightmares or any particular noise, simply because of the feeling that something was unfinished. Something hovering somewhere in her mind and refusing to let go.
The 18th floor.
Back when she worked at Minh Chau Publishing, she occasionally rode the elevator with people from other companies in the building and often heard them talk about that floor. Private. 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.
He hadn't asked. Hadn't waited for her agreement. He'd simply sent it, as if whether she came or not had already been decided, and she just hadn't known yet—and as if knowing or not knowing wouldn't really change anything.
She turned on the faucet, washed her face, and stepped out of the bathroom.
An envelope lay beneath the door.
She noticed it at seven thirty, when she was about to go out for bread. She opened the door, looked down, and stopped. The envelope was white, 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, with nothing on it but a string of numbers and the Ky Nguyen Group logo in the lower corner. The printing was crisp. Not something made 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 scent of coffee drifted faintly from the apartment across the hall. The hallway lights were still on, their pale yellow glow 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, with no reason for anyone to know about it unless they'd deliberately looked 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 not fully 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, clean ink, evenly rounded corners.
Not something someone had ordered overnight.
Which meant that before he sent the email—before she knew she would be invited to the 18th floor—the card had already existed.
She lifted her mug, took a sip, and let the heat settle 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.
Three p.m.
She arrived at 2:58.
It was a habit she couldn't break—Lam Hy was never late, even for appointments she wasn't entirely sure she should keep. Standing in the elevator lobby in Section B, she swiped the card exactly as instructed in the email. A green light came on. The doors opened.
The inside was different from the building's regular elevators. Wider, paneled in dark wood, with no music and none of the synthetic hotel-perfume smell that luxury elevators liked to spray. Only the scent of wood and the cold air of a place where the air conditioning ran constantly without ever being turned off.
She stepped inside. The doors closed.
Her reflection appeared in the polished wood paneling—white blouse, black pants, hair tied low. She had changed clothes 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 obvious effort—and she'd stood in front of the mirror for another five minutes before leaving because she no longer had 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 broad, high-ceilinged space with natural light coming through an entire wall of glass. She stepped out of the elevator, the doors closing behind her, and stood still, looking around.
Wood floors. Bookshelves running along the opposite wall—not decorative shelves, the kind people arranged to look nice and never touched. The books weren't lined up evenly. Some had been pulled out and laid horizontally, bookmarks stuck out, colorful spines mixed together without any apparent order. In the middle of the room stood a large desk with two monitors and papers scattered across it in a methodical kind of mess—not untidy, exactly. Just not put away.
There was no one there.
She stepped farther inside. The wood gave a soft creak beneath her feet.
Then footsteps came from deeper inside—from the door on the left, which she hadn't noticed when she first entered. Even, unhurried steps on the wood floor.
Tran Da Kham walked out.
No suit today. A black dress shirt, sleeves rolled to mid-forearm. He looked at her without saying anything right away—not the look of someone surprised to see a guest, but the look of someone who knew his guest would arrive on time and was confirming his prediction.
She kept her expression neutral.
He walked to the desk and pulled out the chair beside it—not the chair at the head, but the one to the side, the position of someone who actually worked there rather than sat down to meet guests—and took a seat. He gestured toward the chair across from 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 see that when he placed his hand on the desk, there was no cufflink on his left wrist.
A flesh-colored bandage. Neat. Easy to miss if you didn't know to look.
Her eyes paused there.
Half a second. Maybe less.
When she looked up, he was watching her.
Neither of them said anything.
She opened her mouth—then closed it and changed course. “I reviewed the materials you sent.”
“And?”
“And—” She placed her hands on the desk. “I have some thoughts on merging the departments.”
“Go on.”
She did. She didn't look at any notes because she hadn't brought any—she'd read the materials over and over from morning until now, and the numbers, names, and organizational structure were already in her head. She didn't need paper. Retaining sixty percent of the old staff—fine, reasonable, no objections. Restructuring 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 pace isn't consistent. Distribution is the opposite—hard deadlines, printing and distribution schedules that can't be moved. Putting those two under one manager—” She paused. “It's not impossible. But there'll be friction during the first six months. A lot of it.”
He remained silent as she spoke. He didn't nod or take notes, and he didn't have the expression of someone listening out of politeness. He simply looked straight at her, and that gaze—focused in a way that missed not a single word—made her work to keep from speaking faster than usual.
“What specifically would cause the friction?” It wasn't quite a question. More like a request.
“Editorial will think distribution is rushing them. Distribution will think editorial is slow. The two sides will blame each other whenever a deadline is missed—and it will be missed. They'll inevitably miss a few during the initial phase. Then the shared manager will have to deal with internal conflicts instead of focusing on the product.” She paused. “Minh Chau Publishing tried merging them in 2019. They separated them again after eight months.”
Silence.
“You remember those figures.”
“I was there.” She spoke quietly. “I was the one who had to go apologize to two authors because their book launches were pushed back.”
He looked at her for another moment—not evaluatively, but in some other way she couldn't name—then tapped one finger lightly against the desktop.
“Fine. Keep the departments separate.”
She hadn't expected him to agree so quickly. She didn't let it show—or at least she thought she didn't.
“What about the rest of the materials?” he asked.
“The rest…” She went over it in her head. “Basically fine.”
“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 fine, the part she hadn't said outright.
“The person in charge,” she said. “You left that blank.”
“Yes.”
“You're proposing me for it.”
He didn't answer immediately. Afternoon light poured through the glass, long and slanted, casting a pale golden streak across the desk between them. The city was moving outside—she knew because she could see it through the glass—but she couldn't hear anything. The windows were well insulated, or perhaps the floor was high enough that the noise couldn't reach them.
“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—
She didn't know what to do with that. Was it a challenge? An admission? Both at once, in the way that even the most direct answer still wouldn't reveal everything he meant? He finished speaking and looked at her, his expression unchanged, waiting—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 may I know why?” She kept her voice even. “Why me?”
“You answered that question yourself yesterday.”
“The archive system, the authors, the training time.” She nodded. “But that's why you'd keep me. Not why you'd put me in that position.”
He was silent. The silence of someone who already had an answer but was considering it.
“Do you know the difference between someone who's good at reading manuscripts and someone who's good at editing?”
She didn't answer. She waited.
“A good reader sees what the author has written.” He braced one hand on the desk. “A good editor sees what the author wants to write but hasn't been able to yet.”
She looked at him. “Which manuscript of mine 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 realizing it until her fingers began to ache.
He didn't answer verbally.
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 imbalance was still there.
He took something from the shelf. Then he turned and placed it on the desk in front of her.
She looked down.
A manuscript. A4 paper, softbound, with slightly yellowed edges. Handwritten words in blue ink covered the front, the slanted script quick and loose.
Those Who Stayed—manuscript, third draft, August.
She stared at the cover without understanding.
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 a 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 sat and edited every page for more than four months. The book had come out 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 for her own work, marked discreetly in red pen, covered in dense notes along the margins, with some pages folded at the corners.
This copy had existed only on her desk.
The desk she'd cleared out the night before.
She looked at the cover. At the handwriting. At the blue ink stain in the corner—she remembered it. Back when she was editing, she often held a pen while reading, and once the pen had leaked, leaving a small blot in the corner. She'd meant to reprint the cover but had been too lazy.
Her hand lay on the desk. Motionless.
“This…”
She meant to ask where it had come from—but the words reached the tip of her tongue and stopped, because her mind was moving faster than her mouth, putting two and two together, remembering the basement the night before, the three cardboard boxes, and the time between when she'd stepped out of the elevator and when she'd driven away.
She raised her head.
“Where did you get this?”
Her voice was flatter than she'd intended.
“You left it behind.”
She stared 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 piece everything 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 rearranged the boxes, walked to her 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 said. Her voice slowed. “Or one of your people did.”
Tran Da Kham neither confirmed nor denied it. He sat there looking at her, his expression unchanged from the moment she'd entered the room.
She stood.
Not abruptly, not springing up in anger. She rose normally, pushed in her chair, and placed a hand on its back.
“You know my home address.” She listed each thing in turn, 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 him straight in the face. “How long have you been watching me?”
The room was silent.
Outside the glass, the afternoon light had shifted to pale orange, stretching across the wood floor, the desk, and his left wrist—the flesh-colored bandage standing out clearly in the golden light, clearer than when she'd first arrived.
Tran Da Kham looked at her.
This time, longer than before.
“Sit down, Lam Hy.”
“I don't—”
“I'm not finished.”
He didn't raise his voice. He wasn't threatening her. It was simply the statement of someone unaccustomed to being interrupted and who didn't need to change his tone to make that clear.
She stood still.
She didn't sit. But she didn't walk out, 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 is the right question?”
He looked straight at her.
“Why did I stop?”
She left at ten to five.
She rode the elevator down alone, with no music. She stood looking at herself in the polished wood paneling—her reflection staring back, hair still tied low, white blouse, nothing different from when she'd gone up—and thought of nothing. Or tried not to think, but that sentence stayed there, refusing to leave.
Why did I stop?
The meeting ended without any further answers. After that sentence, he neither explained nor elaborated—he simply pushed the documents across the desk, asked her a few questions about the current catalog, and told her she would receive a new contract the next day. Normal. Professional. As if he'd never said those words, and she hadn't asked again because—because why? She didn't know. Something about that moment had kept her from asking, and now, alone in the descending elevator, she no longer understood the reason.
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 the smell of exhaust mixed with something musty from wet trees—the morning had brought a light rain she hadn't noticed.
She opened her bag for 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 script, written quickly, with the final strokes of the words pulled out long.
The same handwriting as on 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. A horn sounded somewhere in the distance.
That sentence wasn't about last night.
It wasn't about the basement, her old company, or anything that had happened over the past two days.
It was about something else.
Something she'd never told anyone—not friends, not former coworkers, 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 the night before.