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 on 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 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 all. No greeting. No signature. Not a word explaining why, what they were meeting about, or what needed to be discussed. The kind of email written by someone unaccustomed to explaining himself—or who didn't think explanations were necessary—because no one had ever asked him to account for himself.
She read it again. Then once more. Finally, she set the phone down on the sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was a mess, the pillow crease still red on her left cheek, her left eye not fully open. She'd slept for four hours—longer than expected, but four hours of fitful sleep, jolting awake whenever she was about to drift off, not because of a nightmare or any particular sound, just the feeling that something was unfinished. Something hovering in the back of her mind and refusing to 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 talking 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'd sent her an access card.
He hadn't asked. He 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 didn't know it yet—and whether she knew or not didn't really change anything.
She turned on the faucet, washed her face, and left the bathroom.
An envelope lay beneath her door.
She noticed it at seven-thirty, when she was about to go out for a banh mi. She opened the door, looked down, and stopped. A white envelope, no name, no stamp. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands—thin and 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 bottom corner. The printing was crisp. Not something made in a hurry.
She stood in the doorway with the card in her hand, looking out at the deserted apartment-building hallway in the early morning. The faint smell of coffee drifted from the unit across the hall. The hallway 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, an address 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. Sat down. 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 smudged, 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 coffee, took a sip, and let the heat go down without blowing on it. She looked out the window. The sky was still murky, the kind of murkiness that came with a 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 shake—Lam Hy was never late, not even to appointments she wasn't entirely sure she should keep. Standing in the elevator lobby of Zone 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 around. Only the scent of wood and cold air, the kind of cold that came from a place where the air-conditioning ran nonstop.
She stepped inside. The doors closed.
Her reflection appeared in the polished wood walls—white blouse, 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, the least deliberate. She'd stood in front of the mirror for another five minutes before leaving because she didn't have 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 room furnished with sofas and magazines like a company lobby. Just a large space with a high ceiling and natural light pouring 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 lining the opposite wall—not decorative shelves, the kind people filled to look nice and never touched. The books weren't aligned, some had been pulled out and laid horizontally, bookmarks stuck out, colorful spines crowded together in no particular order. In the middle of the room was a large desk with two monitors and papers scattered in a mess that was somehow organized—not truly messy, just not tidied.
No one was there.
She took another step inside. The wood gave a soft creak beneath her feet.
Then footsteps came from farther inside—from the door on the left, which she hadn't noticed when she first entered. Footsteps on the wood floor, even and unhurried.
Tran Da Kham stepped out.
No suit today. A black dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the middle of his forearms. He looked at her without speaking right away—not the look of someone surprised that a guest had arrived, but the look of someone who knew the guest would arrive on time and was confirming his prediction.
She kept her expression neutral.
He walked to the desk, pulled out the chair beside it—not the head chair, but a side chair, the place for someone who actually worked rather than sat down to meet guests—and sat. He gestured toward the chair opposite him.
She pulled it out and sat down.
The width of the desk separated them. Not far, not close. Close enough for her to see that when he placed his hands on the desk, there was no cuff on his left wrist.
A flesh-colored medical 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 watching her.
Neither of them spoke.
She opened her mouth—then closed it and changed course. “I've looked over 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 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. Retaining sixty percent of the old staff—fine, reasonable, no objection. Restructuring two departments—also fine, she understood the logic. But merging editorial and distribution—
“Those two departments don't work 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, with printing and distribution schedules that can't be moved. Putting the two under one manager—” She paused. “It's not impossible. But there would be friction during the first six months. A lot of it.”
He stayed silent while she spoke. He didn't nod, take notes, or wear the expression of someone listening out of politeness. He simply looked straight at her, and the focus in that look—the way it missed not a single word—made her work to keep from speaking faster than usual.
“What specifically would cause friction?” It wasn't quite a question. More like a request.
“Editors would think distribution was pushing them. Distribution would think editorial was slow. The two sides would blame each other whenever they missed a deadline—and they would miss them. During the initial period, they were bound to miss several. Then the joint manager would 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 eight months later.”
Silence.
“You remember the figures.”
“I was there.” She spoke quietly. “I was the one who had to apologize to two authors because their books' release dates 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 desk.
“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 back over it in her mind. “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 field for the person in charge,” she said. “You left it blank.”
“Yes.”
“You're proposing me for it.”
He didn't answer immediately. Afternoon light streamed through the glass, long and slanting, casting a pale golden stripe 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 soundproofed, or the floor was high enough that the noise couldn't reach it.
“You think I'm proposing you.”
“If you aren'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. A challenge? An admission? Both at once, in the way even the most straightforward answer could still leave something unsaid? He'd finished speaking and was looking at her, his expression unchanged, waiting—and it wasn't the wait of someone nervous, but of someone who already knew how she would 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 archive system, the authors, the training period.” She nodded. “But that's why you want to keep me. Not why you want to put me in that position.”
He fell silent. The silence of someone who 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 braced a 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 manuscript of mine have you read?”
Silence.
She'd asked the question and immediately realized she was waiting for the answer with more attention than usual—her back had straightened slightly, her left hand tightening 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 still sat a little lower than his right. That slight imbalance was still there.
He took something down from the shelf. Then he turned and placed it on the desk in front of her.
She looked down.
A manuscript. A4 paper, softbound, its edges faintly yellowed. Handwritten blue ink covered the front, the slanted strokes quick and hurried.
Those Who Stay—third draft, August.
She stared at the cover, not understanding.
Not because she didn't recognize it—she knew this book too well. The author wrote under the pen name Minh Ngoc and had sent 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 person to read it. She'd called the director at ten that night. She'd persuaded the board over three rounds of meetings. She'd edited every page for more than four months. The book had come out the previous year and sold out in its first week.
But this wasn't a printed copy. This was the third draft—the one she'd printed herself 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 the night before.
She looked at the cover. At the handwriting on it. At the blue ink stain in the corner—she remembered it. Back when she was editing, she often held a pen while reading. That time, 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 rested on the desk. It didn't move.
“This…”
She meant to ask where it had come from—but the words stopped on her tongue 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 and tried to piece everything together—the access card beneath her door, her home address, the elevator the previous night, the time between when she'd stepped out and when she'd driven out of the basement. Four or five minutes. She'd arranged 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 again 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 watching her with the same unchanged expression he'd worn from the moment she 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 said, listing each thing in an even voice. “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 directly in the face. “How long have you been watching me?”
The room was silent.
Outside the glass, the afternoon light had turned pale orange, stretching across the wood floor, the desk, and his left wrist. The flesh-colored medical bandage showed 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 don't—”
“I haven't finished.”
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't threaten her. It was simply the statement of someone unaccustomed to being interrupted and who didn't need a particular tone to make that clear.
She remained standing.
She didn't sit. But she didn't leave either.
He pulled out his chair and sat, 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,” he said evenly. “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 ten to five.
She rode the elevator down alone, with no music. She stood looking at her reflection in the polished wood wall—her 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 question remained, refusing to leave.
Why did I stop?
The meeting ended without any further answer. After that question, he hadn't explained or elaborated—he'd only pushed the documents across the desk, asked her a few questions about the current catalog, and told her she would receive a new contract tomorrow. Normal. Professional. As though the question had never been spoken. 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 no longer understood what it was.
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 faintly earthy smell of wet trees—the result of the light rain that morning, which she hadn't noticed.
She opened her bag for her keys.
Her hand stopped.
Inside the bag—between her wallet, keys, and lipstick—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, quick strokes, the final lines of the letters trailing long.
The same handwriting as on the cover of Those Who Stay.
One sentence.
This time, you shouldn't stay alone.
She stood on the sidewalk with the paper in her hand, the wind making its edge flutter softly. Pedestrians passed her. Traffic 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 had 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 previous night.