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 on reflex—then froze. The toothbrush was still in her mouth. Her eyes stopped on the sender’s name and refused to read any further, like someone who knew the message wouldn’t be good news and was putting it off for a few more seconds.
Tran Da Kham.
Not his office. Not an assistant or secretary or anyone paid to send emails on his behalf. His own name, his personal address, and a blank subject line.
She spat out the toothpaste, wiped her mouth, and picked up her phone.
Could you come to my office at 3 p.m. today? The 18th floor. Private elevator; access card has been authorized.
That was it. No greeting. No signature. Not a word explaining why, what they were meeting about, or what they needed to discuss. The kind of email sent by someone who wasn’t used to explaining himself—or didn’t think he needed to—because no one had ever asked him to.
She read it again. And again. Then set her phone down on the sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was a mess, a pillow crease still red on her left cheek, her left eye not quite open. She’d slept four hours—more than she’d expected, but the kind of four hours where she kept almost drifting off, then jolting awake. Not because of a nightmare or any noise. Just the feeling that something was unfinished. Something hovering in the back of her mind that wouldn’t let go.
The 18th floor.
Back when she worked at Minh Chau Publishing, she sometimes rode the elevator with people from other companies in the building and heard them talk about that floor. Restricted. Not everyone could get in. Even the building’s employees didn’t know how many offices were up there, who came and went, or what they did. She didn’t know anyone who’d ever been up there.
And he’d sent her an access card.
No question. No waiting for her to agree. He’d sent it, as if whether she came or not had already been decided and she simply hadn’t found out yet—and whether she knew or not didn’t really change anything.
She turned on the faucet, washed her face, and walked out of the bathroom.
An envelope was tucked under her door.
She found it at seven thirty, when she was about to go out for bread. She opened the door, looked down, and stopped. A white envelope, no name, 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 bottom corner. The printing was crisp. It wasn’t something someone had rushed to make.
She stood in the doorway, card in hand, looking down the empty apartment-building hallway in the early morning. The smell of coffee drifted from the apartment across the hall. The hallway lights were still on, casting a pale yellow glow over the tile.
He knew where she lived.
Not her company address. Not her registered address. Her home—the seventh-floor apartment in an ordinary building in Dong Da District. There was no reason for anyone to know it unless they’d gone looking.
She stepped inside and shut the door.
She set the card on the kitchen table. Poured herself a cup of coffee—she’d brewed it as soon as she woke up, out of habit, her hands working while her mind was still half asleep. She sat down and looked at the card.
The Ky Nguyen Group logo was small, in the lower-right corner. The string of numbers meant nothing to her. Dark blue background, ink that hadn’t smudged, corners evenly rounded.
It wasn’t something someone could have ordered overnight.
Which meant the card had existed before he sent the email—before she knew she’d be invited to the 18th floor.
She lifted her coffee, took a sip, and let it cool on its own without blowing on it. She looked out the window. The sky was still murky, the kind of morning sky that hadn’t decided whether it would clear up.
Three p.m.
She arrived at 2:58.
Some habits were impossible to break. Lam Hy wasn’t late, even for appointments she wasn’t entirely sure she should keep. She stood in the elevator lobby in section B and swiped the card as instructed in the email. The light turned green. The doors opened.
It was different from the building’s regular elevators. Wider, paneled in dark wood, with no music and none of the synthetic hotel-perfume smell sprayed in the upscale elevators. Just wood and cold air, the kind that came from a place where the AC ran nonstop.
She stepped inside. The doors slid shut.
Her reflection appeared in the glossy wood: white blouse, black pants, hair tied low. She’d changed clothes three times before leaving home. The first outfit was too formal, the second made her look like she was going to a job interview, and the third was this one—the most ordinary, the least deliberate. Then she’d stood in front of the mirror for another five minutes before heading out because there wasn’t time to change again.
She didn’t understand why she’d changed outfits 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 company lobby. Just a large, high-ceilinged space with natural light pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. She stepped out of the elevator. The doors closed behind her, and she stood still, looking around.
Wood floors. Bookshelves along the opposite wall—not decorative shelves, the kind people filled to make a room look nice and never touched. The books weren’t lined up straight. One had been pulled out and laid on its side; a bookmark stuck out of another. Their colorful spines were jumbled together without any apparent order. In the middle of the room stood a large desk with two monitors and papers scattered across it in an organized sort of mess—not cluttered, just not tidied up.
No one was there.
She stepped farther inside. The wood creaked softly beneath her feet.
Then came footsteps from somewhere inside—the door on the left, which she hadn’t noticed when she first came in. Steady steps on the wood floor, unhurried.
Tran Da Kham walked out.
No suit today. A black shirt, sleeves rolled to the middle of his forearms. He looked at her without saying anything at first—not with the surprise of someone whose visitor had arrived, but with the look of someone who knew she’d be on time and was confirming his prediction.
She kept her expression neutral.
He walked over to the desk, pulled out the chair beside his—not the one at the head, but the one beside it, where someone sat to work rather than meet with guests—and sat down. He gestured toward the chair across from him.
She pulled it out and sat.
The desk’s width separated them. Not too far, not too close. Close enough for her to see, when he rested his hands on the desk, that his left wrist wasn’t covered by a cuff.
A skin-colored medical bandage. Neat. Someone who didn’t know wouldn’t notice.
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’ve reviewed the materials you sent.”
“And?”
“And—” She placed her hands on the desk. “I have some thoughts on consolidating the departments.”
“Go ahead.”
She spoke. She didn’t look at her notes because she hadn’t brought any. She’d read the materials over and over since that morning. 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—
“The two departments don’t work at the same pace,” she said. “Editorial works on a manuscript cycle. One book can take several months, and the pace isn’t consistent. Distribution is the opposite—hard deadlines, print and delivery schedules that can’t be moved. Put both under one manager—” She paused. “It’s not impossible. But there’ll be friction during the first six months. A lot of it.”
He listened without a word as she spoke. He didn’t nod or take notes, and he didn’t have the polite expression of someone merely pretending to listen. He just looked right at her, and that gaze—so intent it seemed to miss nothing—made her fight the urge to speak faster than usual.
“What kind of friction?” It wasn’t quite a question. More like a demand for specifics.
“Editorial will feel pressured by distribution. Distribution will think editorial is too slow. The two sides will blame each other when they miss deadlines—and they will. There’ll be a few missed deadlines during the transition, no matter what. Then the manager overseeing both will be handling internal disputes instead of focusing on the product.” She paused. “Minh Chau Publishing tried merging them in 2019. They split them up again eight months later.”
Silence.
“You remember the numbers.”
“I was there at the time,” she said. “I was the one who had to run around apologizing to two authors because their book launches had been delayed.”
He watched her for another moment—not like he was assessing her, but in some other way she couldn’t name—then tapped one finger lightly on the desk.
“All right. Keep the two departments separate.”
She hadn’t expected him to agree so quickly. She didn’t let it show—or thought she didn’t.
“What about the rest of the proposal?” he asked.
“The rest…” She went over it in her head. “It’s fine. For the most part.”
“For the most part.”
He repeated the phrase. He didn’t emphasize it or say it sarcastically, 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 box for the person in charge,” she said. “You left it blank.”
“Yes.”
“You’re proposing me for the position.”
He didn’t answer right away. Afternoon light streamed through the windows at an angle, stretching across the desk between them in a pale golden streak. The city was moving outside—she could see it through the glass—but she couldn’t hear anything. The windows were soundproof, or the floor was high enough that the noise couldn’t reach them.
“You think I’m proposing you.”
“Why else leave it blank?”
“To see if you’d notice.”
Lam Hy looked at him.
That—
She didn’t know what to do with that answer. Was it a challenge? An admission? Both at once, in the way that even the most direct answer still didn’t tell the whole story? He’d said it, then looked at her with an unchanged expression and waited—not with the nervousness of someone waiting, but with the confidence of someone who already knew how she’d react and was checking whether he’d been right.
“Then can I know why?” She kept her voice even. “Why me?”
“You answered that question yourself yesterday.”
“The records system, the authors, the training timeline.” She nodded. “But those are reasons to keep me. Not reasons to put me in that position.”
He fell silent. The silence of someone who already had an answer but was weighing 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 leaned his hands 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 have you read?”
Silence.
She asked the question and realized right away that she was waiting for the answer with more attention than usual—her back had straightened slightly, her left hand had clenched under the desk without her noticing, until her fingers began to ache.
He didn’t answer in words.
He stood and walked to the bookshelves. She followed him with her eyes. His steps were more normal than the night before, no longer heavy and slow, like he was concentrating all his strength on not falling. But his left shoulder was still a little lower than his right. That same slight imbalance.
He took something off the shelf. Then he turned and set it on the desk in front of her.
She looked down.
A manuscript. A4 pages in a softcover binding, the edges faintly yellowed. Handwriting in blue ink on the cover, slanted and hurried.
The Ones Who Stayed — Manuscript, Draft 3, 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 emailed the manuscript to Minh Chau Publishing anonymously, with no photo or personal information, only a brief sentence attached to the file. She’d been the first to read it. She’d called the director at ten at night. She’d persuaded the board through three rounds of meetings. She’d spent more than four months editing it page by page. The book had come out last year and sold out in its first week.
But this wasn’t the published edition. This was Draft 3—the copy she’d printed out to work on, densely marked in red pen, with notes filling the margins and some pages folded at the corners.
This copy had only been on her desk.
The desk she’d cleared out last night.
She looked at the cover. At the handwriting. At the blue ink stain in the corner. She remembered it. While editing, she used to hold a pen as 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 he’d gotten it—but the words reached the tip of her tongue and stopped. Her mind was moving faster than her mouth, adding two and two, remembering the basement last night, the three cardboard boxes, and the time between when she stepped out of the elevator and when she drove away.
She looked up.
“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 drop it.”
“I didn’t—” She stopped and took a breath. “This manuscript was in the second box. I remember clearly. I put it in there myself.”
He said nothing.
She looked at him and tried to piece it all together—the access card under her door, her home address, the elevator last night, the time between when she stepped out and when she drove out of the basement. Four or five minutes. She’d rearranged the boxes, walked to the parking spot, put them in the trunk, checked, and shut it.
The trunk hadn’t locked right away. She remembered having to hit the lock button a second time because it hadn’t worked the first time.
Plenty of time for someone who knew what they were doing.
“You got into my car,” she said, her voice slowing. “Or someone who works for you did.”
Tran Da Kham neither confirmed nor denied it. He sat watching her with the same unchanging expression he’d worn since she walked into the room.
She stood up.
Not abruptly, not springing to her feet in anger. She stood normally, pushed in her chair, and placed her hand on its back.
“You know where I live,” she listed, one thing at a time, her voice level. “You have a manuscript you took from my car. You sent the access card before I got your email, which means it had already been made.” She looked straight at him. “How long have you been watching me?”
The room was silent.
Outside the windows, the afternoon light had turned pale orange, stretching across the wood floor and the desk and his left wrist. The skin-colored bandage was clear in that golden light, more visible than it had been when she first came in.
Tran Da Kham looked at her.
Longer this time than before.
“Sit down, Lam Hy.”
“I’m not—”
“I’m not finished.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t threaten her. It was simply the statement of someone who wasn’t used to being interrupted and didn’t need to use his tone to make that clear.
She stayed where she was.
She didn’t sit. But she didn’t leave, either.
He pulled out his chair and sat down, placing his hands on the desk—his left hand, the bandage right in front of her, closer than before.
“You want to know how long I’ve been watching you,” he said evenly. “That’s not the right question.”
She looked at him. “What’s the right question?”
He looked straight at her.
“Why I stopped.”
She left at ten minutes to five.
She rode the elevator down alone, without music. She stood looking at the glossy wood wall—her reflection looking back at her, hair still tied low, white blouse, nothing different from when she’d gone up—and thought about nothing. Or tried not to think, but that sentence wouldn’t go away.
Why I stopped.
The meeting ended without any further answers. After saying that, he didn’t explain or elaborate. He just pushed the documents across the desk, asked her a few questions about the current catalog, and told her she’d get her new contract tomorrow. 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 elevator going down, she couldn’t understand why anymore.
Ding. The ground-floor lobby.
She stepped out, walked through the glass doors, and stopped on the sidewalk. The evening wind blew down the street, carrying the smell of car exhaust mixed with something musty from the wet trees. There’d been a light rain that morning, which she hadn’t noticed.
She opened her bag to get her keys.
Her hand stopped.
Inside her bag, between her wallet, keys, and lipstick case, was a piece of paper. Small, folded in quarters. She hadn’t put it there. She was sure. She used this bag every day and knew what was inside.
She took it out and unfolded it.
Handwriting. Blue ink. Slanted and hurried, with the final strokes of the words trailing off.
The same handwriting as on the cover of The Ones Who Stayed.
One sentence.
This time, you shouldn’t be alone.
She stood on the sidewalk, the paper in her hand, its edge fluttering in the wind. People walked past her, traffic moved along the street, and somewhere in the distance a horn sounded.
The sentence wasn’t about last night.
It wasn’t about the basement, or the old company, or anything that had happened over the last two days.
It was about something else.
Something she’d never told anyone—not her friends, not her former colleagues, no one. Something she’d decided to bury deep enough that she wouldn’t have to remember it anymore.
Tran Da Kham knew about it.
And he’d known before she stepped into the elevator last night.