Chapter 4: The Missing Woman
The truck roared into the night. Linh lay flat against the metal bed, rain soaking her through, her hands clutching the side like it was the edge of the world.
She didn't cry. She couldn't.
Somewhere behind her, lost in the rain and the trees, was Mai.
There had been no goodbye. No final look. Only a hurried whisper in the dark:
"You must run. No matter what you hear behind you—don't stop."
Linh hadn't stopped. But the guilt did.
In her pocket, she found the embroidered cloth Mai had slipped into her hand moments before the escape. The thread was old, the colors faded. But in the corner, one letter remained, delicate and trembling—M.
She held it against her chest as the truck carried her farther and farther away.
Three days later, the driver dropped her at a police checkpoint.
Linh stumbled through her story in broken Chinese—pauses between memories, gaps filled with silence.
The officer frowned. "No ID? No passport? You crossed illegally?"
She nodded. Shame burned hotter than fear.
For a moment, he studied her.
Then: "Sit. Wait."
She waited. She thought he would send her back.
To the village.
To the man.
To the cell.
But hours later, they called the Vietnamese embassy. And the next day, she was moved to a women's shelter in a neighboring city.
There, she met others.
Women with broken backs and broken voices. Girls who had stopped smiling before they turned fifteen.
Each had a name. A wound. A scar.
But none had heard of Mai.
Linh asked every person she met—nurses, translators, officers, survivors.
Most shook their heads.
One woman whispered, "An old lady was caught that night. They said she fought back. She bit a guard. Then… she vanished."
That night, Linh couldn't sleep. She laid the cloth on the table in the shelter's common room and stared at it under the flickering light.
She remembered Mai's hands—rough, callused, always trembling.
She remembered how Mai once said, "I had a daughter once. She would've been your age now."
Linh never asked what happened.
Now, she knew the answer.
A month later, she returned to Vietnam.
No one waited at the airport.
No one called her name.
She passed through immigration like a ghost—quiet, invisible, not yet ready to live, but not willing to die.
She took the long road home, sitting by the bus window, watching rice fields blur into the horizon.
In her bag was the cloth. In her heart—an oath.
She was no longer the girl who had been sold.
She was a survivor.
A bearer of a name. A memory. A woman who had no grave, only a single stitched letter.
From today, I will live for her.
And I will live…
as if I had never shattered in the first place.
Because some souls survive
not for themselves—
but to carry the name of those
who didn't.