Chapter 6 — Debt Book at the End of the Alley

Dieu woke up earlier than usual, her eyes were still dark from lack of sleep, but her mind was unusually alert, as if her body was tired but her will had been recharged with a new source of energy from last night's discoveries. She opened the shop as usual, her hands were much more agile than in the first clumsy days, but her mind still kept returning to the debt book hidden at the bottom of the cupboard.

Uncle Tu arrived on time, bringing vegetables bought from the market, but today Dieu noticed that he seemed more thoughtful, occasionally glancing at her as if he were investigating something.

"Did you not sleep well? Your eyes are so dark," he asked, his voice worried.

“I have a bit of trouble sleeping,” Dieu replied, trying to keep her voice normal, avoiding his eyes. “Probably because I worry too much about my mother and the shop.”

Uncle Tu nodded and did not ask further, but Dieu felt an underlying tension between the two that had never existed before, as if both were hiding something, but no one was brave enough to say it first.

The morning passed at a familiar pace — regular customers coming in and out, the sound of greetings, the sound of knives and chopping boards. But this time, every time old customers came to dinner to write down their debts, Dieu couldn't help but glance at them with a different look, wondering if their names appeared in that old book, and if so, what was the story behind that debt.

Near noon, when the shop was temporarily empty, Dieu used the excuse of needing to go to the bank to get home, took out the debt book and read it more carefully in the daylight, wanting to confirm that what he saw last night was not a hallucination due to lack of sleep.

She spread the notebook out on the table, starting from the first page, slowly reading each line, this time with the alertness of the day instead of the panic of the night. The more she read, the more she realized the true scale of what her mother had done — not a few isolated loans, but hundreds of transactions spanning nearly twenty years, totaling a number that Dieu, with her accounting experience, estimated would have been hundreds of millions of dong if added up, even though most had been marked as settled.

She took an empty notebook and began to compile a summary table — names of people, amounts of money, dates, statuses (crossed out or not) — following the same method she used in her accounting work. This was the only way she knew how to deal with such a large and emotionally charged mass of information: turn it into numbers that could be sorted, analyzed, and from which meaning could be derived.

After more than an hour of hard work, Dieu's summary table began to show a clearer picture. Small debts, under five hundred thousand dong, have mostly been marked off, perhaps because customers pay them off over time. But there is a larger group of debts, from one million VND or more, most of which are crossed out with a star — and all of these have one thing in common that Dieu only realized after rearranging them in chronological order: they are all related to families in particularly difficult circumstances, such as homes with seriously ill people, homes that have lost their main breadwinner, or homes that have suffered fires or natural disasters.

Dieu sat quietly looking at his summary table, a hypothesis gradually forming clearly in his mind - perhaps the large debts marked with stars were not paid with money, but in some other form, maybe effort, maybe reciprocal help in a "reciprocal" way. People who have lived for a long time in a small community often use it when money is not always available.

She remembered what Uncle Tu said the other day, about how he "owed my family a lot of things". Was he the one who silently "paid" those debts on behalf of difficult families, by repairing cars for free, or by other forms of support that Dieu could not yet fully imagine?

Her phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. It's Huong.

"How are you? I haven't received any messages these days, I'm so worried," Huong asked, her voice full of concern.

“I'm fine,” Dieu replied, although her voice couldn't hide the fatigue. "It's just... I just discovered a lot of strange things about my mother and this shop. It's very complicated. I'll tell you about it when I'm free."

“What makes it so mysterious?” Huong was curious. "Do you need any help? You know I'm familiar with books, so just send me anything."

Dieu thought for a moment, then decided. "Yes, let me take a photo of a few pages of the notebook and send it to you to look at. I need a cool head other than mine to analyze, I'm afraid I'm thinking too much."

"Send it, I'll look at it right away," Huong replied firmly.

Dieu took a photo of some of the most important pages of the notebook and sent it via text message to Huong, along with a brief explanation of the context. She deliberately did not send the part related to the eighty million Kim Phat loan, wanting to keep the most sensitive information until she learned more herself.

A few minutes later, Huong called back. "I've had a quick look. You're right, this marking method has a real pattern, it's not random. Let me take a closer look tonight, analyze it properly and then let you know."

“Thank you very much,” Dieu said, feeling relieved to have another trustworthy person joining hands to decode this mystery.

In the afternoon, when Dieu returned to the shop, she saw Uncle Tu standing and talking to a strange man in front of the door, both of them seemed tense. When he saw Dieu, the strange man quickly said hello and left, while Uncle Tu returned to the shop with an unnatural look on his face.

“Who is it, uncle?” Dieu asked, curious.

"Ah, old acquaintance, just asking about business," Uncle Tu replied, his voice somewhat hurried, avoiding looking her directly in the eyes - something that rarely happened to the always straightforward, honest man she knew.

Dieu didn't ask further, but she remembered that strange man's face, a new wariness was gradually forming in her - the feeling that, behind the familiar peaceful appearance of this alley, there were many things going on silently that she had only just begun to see on the surface.

That evening, after closing the shop, Dieu went to the hospital to visit her mother as usual, carrying the debt book hidden in her bag, although she did not dare to show it to her mother right away for fear that she would be too emotional. She sat by the bed, telling her mother about her busy day at the shop, trying to keep her voice light and cheerful so as not to make her mother worry more.

Her mother listened, occasionally nodding or smiling weakly, but there was still a constant worry in her eyes that Dieu couldn't help but notice. She wondered if that worry was related to the notebook she was hiding in her pocket, to the eighty million dong debt in Kim Phat's name, or to even older secrets that she still didn't dare to ask directly.

“Mom,” Dieu began, her voice cautious, “I found your old notebook, in a jar of rice in the warehouse. Do you remember?

Her mother stopped, her eyes wide open, a clearer reaction than Dieu had seen in the past few days. She tried to lift her right hand and point towards Dieu's bag, her mouth moving to make urgent, worried sounds.

"Don't worry, Mom," Dieu grabbed her mother's hand, trying to reassure her. “I haven't told anyone yet, I'm just finding out. Mom, can you tell me who Kim Phat is? Why did you borrow so much money without telling me?”

Hearing the name "Kim Phat", her mother reacted much more violently, her whole body trembled, her hand tightened around Dieu's hand to the point of pain, her eyes filled with tears, the sounds coming from her mouth became more urgent and panicked.

The nurse on duty heard the strange noise and rushed in, checked the vital signs, and reminded Dieu to keep the patient calm and avoid emotionally arousing topics.

“I'm sorry mom,” Dieu said, her voice shaking because she regretted asking too hastily. “I won't ask anymore, mom, go rest.”

She sat back and soothed her mother until she calmed down and fell into an exhausted sleep. Dieu sat and watched her mother sleep, filled with a feeling of guilt mixed with determination - her mother's fierce reaction only further confirmed that the name "Kim Phat" carried something truly scary, something that she needed to find out, but had to do it alone, unable to continue to put direct pressure on her mother in her current fragile health condition.

On the way home, she reopened Huong's message, who had sent a few more comments about the arrangement of the debt book. “I find this way of taking notes very systematic, not arbitrary,” Huong wrote. “You should find out if there are any official loans in your mother's name and compare them with this book to understand the full financial picture.”

Dieu read the message, nodding alone in the darkness of the motorbike taxi ride home, thinking that her next step, no matter how scary, would be to find a way to accurately verify that Kim Phat loan - where it came from, who was the guarantor, and most importantly, why it made her mother so panicked that she couldn't control her emotions just because she heard that name.

When she got home, she took the notebook back, opened it to the last page with the words about the loan, took a clear photo and saved it in a separate folder on her phone, carefully password-protecting it. She knew that, from tonight, she could no longer consider this a mere family secret — it had become a matter that needed serious investigation, with all the necessary evidence and alertness, before it could swallow up everything her mother had tried to preserve over the years.