That village lay nestled among fields stretching all the way to the horizon.
Whenever harvest season came, the entire village seemed draped in shimmering gold. In the morning, dew still clung to the roadside grass, each tiny droplet reflecting the first sunlight of the day. Wind blowing in from the fields carried the rich, familiar scent of ripening rice.
A winding concrete road ran past bamboo thickets, rows of areca palms, and low-roofed single-story homes. During the day, the place was so peaceful that people could clearly hear an old woman's slippers dragging as she walked to the market, roosters crowing from the far end of the hamlet, or the sound of a water pump carrying over from the fields.
At the far end of the village stood an old single-story house.
The house wasn't large.
There was one living room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen in the back. The tiled roof had faded with age. In front of the yard stood an old star-fruit tree, its trunk gnarled, its roots breaking through the earth like an old person's fingers clutching at the ground.
It belonged to Mr. Nho and Mrs. Tinh.
The two of them were old.
Mr. Nho rarely spoke. Every morning, he rose before dawn, swept the yard, and sat beside his green-tea pot. Mrs. Tinh was the opposite. Her hands were always busy and her mouth always moving. As soon as she finished picking vegetables, she swept the house; as soon as she finished feeding the chickens, she called for her grandchild.
The person living with them was Nha Han.
Nha Han was nineteen years old.
She had a delicate face and slightly sallow skin because she had been frail since childhood. Han's parents had died when she was little, so Mr. Nho and Mrs. Tinh had taken turns raising her.
Han grew up in that house, amid the smell of kitchen smoke, the chirping of insects in the garden, and her grandmother's voice calling every morning:
"Han, come eat."
There was also the family of Mr. and Mrs. Nho's youngest son, Minh.
Minh lived in the same house with his wife, Vang, and their two young children.
Their life was poor but peaceful.
Until one day at the end of harvest season.
That day, no one in the family knew that a single trip to see a fortune-teller would turn their once-peaceful home into a place where no one dared turn off the lights after dark.