Chapter 9 — Room 404 Sea View

Linh brought over Nhi's old therapy notes, not to secretly read them, but to remind her that there were many gaps in her memory of the day her mother disappeared, something Nhi had recorded for herself during brief therapy sessions she attended years ago and then left them unfinished.

Nhi remembers her mother leaving home wearing a blue jacket, an image she always affirmed every time she was asked, but station records recorded that her mother wore a red life jacket during that shift, in accordance with the station's safety uniform regulations. She remembered the train whistle sounding before her mother left home, while this city had never had a railway line, a detail that could not exist in reality but was still clearly present in her memory.

“Do you feel conflicted?” Linh asked, placing the therapy file on the table and opening it to the page recording Nhi's story from many years ago.

“I see,” Nhi replied, her voice not as defensive as Linh might have feared. "But I also see things that fit — the lifeline buttons, the colored lines on the hand-drawn drawings, the tilt of the shoulders when listening to the radio. Not everything in my memory is wrong."

Linh says trauma can superimpose sounds from other days onto the same event, a common psychological defense mechanism she learned in her professional training, not something to be ashamed of or to question the credibility of the person experiencing it. Nhi replied that it would not cause the photo or the elevator book to suddenly disappear from reality, nor would it make the piece of paper with number 04 in the rescue box become non-existent.

They looked at their mother's hand drawing again, spreading it out on the table under the bright light. Linh realized that the hallway leading to 404 matched almost perfectly with a drawing Nhi once drew in her old student notebook, which Linh accidentally found while moving through her family's belongings a few months ago and brought with her today to compare.

Nhi picked up her student notebook, turned to the page with that drawing, and stared at it for a long time. She didn't remember when or under what circumstances she drew it, although the date written in the corner of the page confirmed that she was only eight years old at the time, a year before her mother disappeared.

"If you've seen the original drawing since you were eight years old," Nhi said slowly, trying to organize her thoughts, "then the fact that you 'discovered' it on a digitized drawing isn't necessarily a strange phenomenon. It could just be a latent memory surfacing at the right time, triggered by a familiar environment."

“That's a reasonable explanation,” Linh agreed. "But it doesn't explain why the rectangle moves every time you save a file on your computer. Implicit memories can't interfere with software."

Vu, who had just completed a detailed examination of warehouse 404-B's timeline according to newly received marine station records, found an important milestone: room 404-B was converted into an official rescue warehouse seven days before the big storm nineteen years ago, much earlier than the team initially predicted. There is no record of it being returned to the hotel in its original state after the sea station ceased to be used, an administrative vacuum that continued until the landslide.

Dat, while waiting for the team to complete the technical pieces, personally interviewed people living under the sea cliff, people who had witnessed the hotel during its years of operation. An old woman has lived in a small house near the fishing wharf for more than fifty years year, clearly remember there was a flash of light coming from the fourth floor of the hotel on the night of the landslide, a steady rhythm that was different from normal household lights, then turned off completely and never lit up again.

“How do the lights flash?” Nhi asked when Dat recounted the interview to the group.

“The old lady described it as flashing in a regular rhythm, like a Morse signal, even though she didn't know how to read that code,” Dat replied. “She just remembers it stopping suddenly, right before she heard the rumbling sound of rocks falling into the sea.”

Nhi asked Linh if her mother could have turned on the signal light to guide the rescue ship to the dangerous area, a hypothesis that had been gradually forming clearly in her mind over the past few days. Linh, although not completely denying that possibility, reminded her sister to be careful, not to rush to turn a reasonable possibility into a fact that has not been fully verified.

Nhi agrees with that reminder. Isolate two separate columns in your survey file, clearly labeled: one column records "things verified by independent evidence", the other column records "things only remembered or heard about, need further confirmation". She moved the hypothesis about the signal light to the second column, even though in her heart she almost believed it to be true.

Dat suggested posting a preliminary article immediately to put public pressure on Ms. Hanh and the bank, taking advantage of the current information momentum. Nhi firmly refused, explaining that an article lacking solid evidence could cause the entire survey file to be attacked by the opposing side for authenticity, leading to the project being completely shut down before they could collect all the necessary evidence.

Linh stayed at the hotel for one night at Nhi's invitation, wanting to see her sister's working environment firsthand, but chose to sleep in a room on the third floor, away from the fourth floor hallway. Nhi did not ask her to go to room 404, respecting the boundaries Linh set for herself.

Before leaving the hotel the next morning, Linh said to her sister, her younger sister's voice more serious than usual: "If mom saved someone and then disappeared, that doesn't force me to save the whole hotel for mom."

Nhi looked at the room that was partially hidden behind the remaining wooden wall, now almost completely dismantled, only a few pieces of wood remained. She began to understand that she had the right to stop at any time, but she wanted to stop, if at all, after knowing for sure what really needed to be kept and what could be left in the past.

After seeing Linh off to the bus station, Nhi returned to the construction site office and saw Vu waiting with a new set of documents on the table. He had just received official feedback from the marine station about the history of operating the signal lights along the cliff, a much thicker set of records than what they had before.

“There's a routine maintenance report,” Vu said, opening the document to the page with the red stamp. "It was noted that the signal lights were operating normally three months before the landslide, consistent with the note in her mother's notebook about checking the wires. But there was another, later incident report, stating that the lights stopped working on the night of the landslide, at 04:20."

Nhi calculated mentally, compared with the time table: 04:12 elevator stopped, 04:15 no response, 04:18 power cut, 04:20 signal light stopped working. The four timelines are only a few minutes apart, creating a consecutive series of events that cannot be a coincidence.

“Who makes the signal light incident report?” she asked, her voice strained.

Vu flip to the last page, pointing to a faded signature box. "Can't read the full name, but the title says 'station attendant', not official technician. Probably someone who happened to be present and recorded the incident, not the person in charge of regular maintenance."

Nhi added the mark 04:20 to the summary time table, which has now become a central document of the entire survey, posted on the wall of the construction site office, each mark marked with a different colored piece of paper depending on the type of source — technical, eyewitness, or inference.

“Four minutes,” she said, looking at the time line stretching across the wall. "From the time the elevator stopped to the time the lights went out, there were only four minutes. During those four minutes, three different decisions were made — no response, power cut, and lights out."

“Either three different people react to the same situation,” Vu added, “or a single person makes all three decisions in quick succession, in a state of panic or under extreme pressure.”

Nhi didn't answer right away, just stood looking at the time table, trying to imagine that fateful four-minute scene, when her mother, maybe along with other people, were in a small room overlooking the ocean, while the whole system around them was collapsing one by one according to each timeline recorded coldly, precisely in the pages now spread before her eyes.

She took a photo of the entire timeline, sent a copy to the entire survey team with a note asking each person to review the document they were responsible for, looking for any additional timelines that could fill in the missing gaps in that fateful four-minute sequence, before the general meeting scheduled to take place the next morning, when the group would review the entire chain of evidence from the beginning.