Chapter 48: The Secret Hoa Kept
The
man from her unit had followed Hoa as far as the hospital gates. He saw her
come face to face with An Nhien, and then he turned back.
By
the time she got in, he had been waiting in her office for the better part of
half an hour.
The
moment she pushed the door open, he snapped the file in his hand shut.
Something
in the set of his jaw told her he hadn’t come to talk about work.
Hoa
set her bag down on the desk without hurrying.
“Have
you been waiting long? Is it something urgent?”
He
studied her for a beat.
“You’ve
seen An Nhien again. Haven’t you?”
Hoa’s
fingers, halfway through the buttons of her coat, went still.
It
lasted no more than a second before she had herself back under control. But the
man across from her had already caught it.
“Who
told you that?”
“I
saw her myself. At the place you’d just come from.”
He
took a step closer.
“You’ve
known An Nhien is alive. So why haven’t you told Dinh Bac?”
Hoa
turned away from the question in his eyes.
“Are
you following me?”
“I’m
not following you. But I know Dinh Bac has spent years hunting for that woman.
And you know it better than anybody.”
Every
word he said landed exactly where she least wanted it to.
She
knew how much Dinh Bac missed An Nhien.
Through
all those years abroad, through surgery after surgery, through the blood draws
and the trials that hollowed his body out, he had never once stopped asking
after her.
There
were times he surfaced from a fever with his eyes barely able to open, and the
first thing out of his mouth was:
“Have
you found anything on An Nhien yet?”
She
had lost count of how many times she’d had to tell him no.
Each
time, Dinh Bac only went quiet. He never blamed her, never pushed. But it was
that silence that told her the girl was lodged somewhere so deep in him that
nobody else would ever fill the space.
Hoa
had been there through the years he couldn’t see light.
She
had taught him to walk again. Read documents aloud to him. Sat outside
operating rooms with her hands going cold, holding her face steady because
somebody had to.
She
had watched him claw his way back from a man with nothing left in his hands.
And
at the end of all of it, the person he was waiting for was still An Nhien.
The
day she caught sight of Phuong Nga, Hoa had known at once. This was the girl
from ten years ago. And the first thing that rose in her, in that moment, was
not the urge to run and tell Dinh Bac.
It
was fear.
Fear
that the second Dinh Bac learned An Nhien was alive, he would go straight to
her.
Fear
that all those years she had spent quietly at his side would turn into
something not worth mentioning. That she would stay what she had always been:
the older sister, the teammate, the woman who could walk into fire beside him
and never once get through the door of his heart.
The
selfishness of it shamed her. And the more it shamed her, the less she could
stand having it dragged into the open.
The
man in front of her today looked like he could see straight to the bottom of
her.
“Hoa.
Why aren’t you saying anything? How long do you intend to sit on this?”
That
last question snapped something loose in her.
She
rounded on him, her voice climbing with anger and something closer to panic.
“I’ve
already told you this has nothing to do with you!” she snapped. “Whether I say
anything is my business. Stay out of it!”
He
frowned. He clearly didn’t accept the answer. The look he gave her was equal
parts disappointment and disbelief.
But
he did exactly as she’d asked and let it drop. He picked the file up off the
desk, turned, and walked out without another word.
The
door clicked shut and left Hoa alone in the quiet. She pulled out her chair,
sat down, opened the folder in front of her, and couldn’t get through a single
line of it.
His
question kept circling back. Why hadn’t she said anything?
She
knew the answer.
It
was only that the answer was so small, so mean, that even she didn’t want to
own it.
A
few days later, Dinh Bac went to Huu Loc’s grave alone.
Dong
Cang had come through a rainstorm that morning. Water still stood on the stone
paths, and the wind cutting between the rows of trees carried a thin, raw cold.
Dinh Bac walked slowly among the headstones with a bunch of white flowers in
one hand.
He
had known where the grave was for a long time. Today was the first day he’d been
able to come himself.
When
he saw the name cut into the stone, his feet turned heavy.
Tran
Huu Loc still wore the same gentle, careworn face in the small photograph. The
eyes of a dead man looked straight ahead, calm, as though none of this life’s
suffering had ever reached him.
Dinh
Bac stood without moving. The old memories came back one after another, and he
said none of the things he had carried here. He only bent down and laid the
white flowers at the foot of the stone.
The
instant his fingertips met the cold granite, An Nhien rose up in his mind.
He
had never once seen her face in all the time they’d had together. What he
remembered was her voice, the rhythm of her footsteps, and the hands that
always announced themselves before they reached him.
For
six years he had looked for her with everything he had.
But
An Nhien and Dong might as well have been two names scrubbed out of the city.
No
word. No trace. Not one person who could say whether the two of them were alive
or dead.
Dinh
Bac used to tell himself that as long as no body had turned up, there was still
hope. But hope held too long wears a person down.
He
stood at Huu Loc’s grave a long while before he turned to go.
At
that exact moment, out at the cemetery gates, Phuong Nga came walking in. She
had a small bag in one hand and was moving slowly toward the interior. Not
watching her feet, she caught a pebble, felt the grit slide into her shoe, and
bent to pull it off, so she never saw the man coming toward her.
Dinh
Bac was deep in his own head, his eyes on nothing but the path ahead.
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