Chapter 1 — The Heiress's Selection of a Husband

At ten o'clock at night, the hospital room was still lit with cold white light. The smell of antiseptic mixed with Mrs. Lien's weak breath made Ton Anh Thu had to squeeze her throat to keep from crying out loud. Outside the window, the city lit shined through the thin curtains, and on the bedside table, the ivory wedding dress still lay in a silk bag, waiting to be worn on her body tomorrow at her engagement ceremony with Lam Vinh Phat.

"Letter." Ms. Lien's voice was hoarse, each word seemed to have to be pulled from the bottom of her lungs. "You don't have much time left. There's something you've been hiding from me for twenty years, you have to tell it today."

Anh Thu held her thin hand tightly, feeling each bone protruding under the paper-thin skin. "Don't say that. Tomorrow I still need you to attend my engagement ceremony."

"That wedding..." Mrs. Lien closed her eyes, her breath hitched, "...not because of you, but because Mr. La Binh wanted a part in the merger between Tan Phuc and the Lam family group. You are the heiress on paper, but for the past eight years, all the company's major decisions have been in his hands. She kept quiet because she was afraid that you wouldn't be strong enough to resist an entire board of directors. But if you enter that marriage, you will lose both the company and yourself."

Anh Thu was stunned. She had suspected many things in the company over the years, meetings where she was invited out of the room, signatures she had to write without carefully reading the content, but she had never dared to face such a naked truth.

Mrs. Lien put her trembling hand into the bedside drawer and took out a small old wooden box, the paint on the box's surface was peeling off. "This is something I've kept for you since you were young. I planned to wait until you were married and then give it to you, but now I can't wait any longer."

Inside the box was a half-faced lotus-shaped jade pendant, blue in color with a bit of white veining, and a leather-bound notebook with frayed corners, the handwriting inside was smudged with ink on a few pages due to time. Ms. Thu turned the first pages with trembling hands and saw the name of a strange but strangely familiar person: Ton Dac Nghia.

"That's my biological father." Mrs. Lien said, her voice suddenly becoming clear as if she put all her last strength into this story. "Twenty-five years ago, he was the right-hand man of a man named Chu Vinh Toan, chairman of Chu Nguyen Group in Xuyen Giang City. Your father managed all the core capital flows of that group, and was trusted by Mr. Vinh Toan like a brother. But then one day, it was discovered that the books were falsified, billions of dong disappeared without a trace, and all evidence pointed to your father."

"But he didn't do it." Ms. Thu said, not a question.

"I believe not." Mrs. Lien nodded weakly. "Your father always told your mother that there were people in the Chu family who were jealous of his position, but before he could find the evidence, he was kicked out of the group and turned away by the entire Xuyen Giang business community. He had to take your mother and run away, change her name to Vu, and drift to a remote countryside to live anonymously. I was born there, in a situation where my parents had an unjust reputation and no one would listen."

Anh Thu clasped half of the jade pendant in the palm of her hand, the cold feeling of the gem gradually warmed with the human breath. "What about your father..."

"He died of liver disease, three years after escaping. The resentment accumulated for too long, his body could not bear it." Mrs. Lien sighed, her eyes that had become cloudy with age suddenly flashed with old pain. "Your mother followed him not long after. She was the housekeeper, and she entrusted you to her before she died. She used the money she had saved all her life, plus the little capital your father left behind, to build Tan Phuc, just so you could have a place to stand, and not have to live your whole life in the dark like your parents."

"I will find out the truth." Anh Thu said, her voice was shaking but determined. "I'll go to the Chu family and find out what really happened."

"I knew you would say that." Mrs. Lien smiled, a rare smile during this heavy evening. "That's why I gave you this before it's too late. Don't let anyone know your true identity, at least not yet. The Chu family is still there, the Chu Nguyen group is still operating, Mr. Vinh Toan's son is now grown up, taking over the business. If the person who harmed your father in the past is still in that family, you appearing with your true identity will only make them wary, and even erase all remaining traces."

That night, Mrs. Lien breathed her last breath near dawn, her hand still gently holding Anh Thu's hand. She sat quietly in the empty hospital room, tears falling continuously but her mind was unusually alert, as if the pain of losing her only remaining relative had turned into a fire of determination smoldering in her chest.

The next morning, when the whole Tan Phuc villa was bustling with preparations for the engagement ceremony, with the makeup team, florist, and chef rushing in and out, Anh Thu locked the door to her private room and stood in front of the mirror looking at herself in her exquisitely tailored evening dress. She reached out to touch each intricately curled strand of hair, then took scissors from the drawer and cut her long, shiny hair down to shoulder length, leaving the curls scattered on the shiny wooden floor.

She replaced her gorgeous dress with a pair of rough brown clothes, a cheap fabric she had secretly bought from a small suburban market a few days ago, just in case she needed it. Her carefully made-up face was wiped clean, replaced by a layer of dark powder, a bit of dust to simulate sunburn, and her soft hands were deliberately rubbed against the rough brick wall to create a few rough calluses.

Looking in the mirror for the last time, she was no longer Ton Anh Thu, the heiress of Tan Phuc, whom the media once praised as "the quiet flower of the business world". She became a country girl named Do Thi Thu, without a father or mother, only carrying a small cloth bag containing a few old clothes, half of the jade pendant hidden tightly in her bra, and her father's notebook wrapped in a waterproof plastic bag.

She opened the second-floor bedroom window and looked down at the garden behind the villa, where gardeners were cleaning pots of Phalaenopsis orchids for this afternoon's ceremony. No one noticed the small figure climbing over the railing, clinging to the bougainvillea trellis climbing the wall, then falling to the ground, weaving through the fence at the back of the garden where there was a space without security cameras, something she had been silently observing for many days.

As she stepped out of the side gate and into the bustling stream of people on the morning street, Anh Thu looked back at the magnificent mansion that was preparing for a wedding where she would never appear. She imagined the scene where Mr. La Binh turned pale when he discovered his bride had disappeared, and the scene where Lam Vinh Phat stood in the middle of the banquet hall with an angry and humiliated expression in front of hundreds of guests. A part of her felt guilty, but a larger part felt strangely relieved, as if she had just taken off a heavy layer of armor that she had worn since childhood.

On the old bus leaving the city, Anh Thu sat close to the window, clutching the cloth bag in her lap. She pulled out her father's notebook, turned back to the first pages that Mrs. Lien had shown her last night, where Ton Dac Nghia's handwriting recorded each financial item, meticulously collated numbers, and on a page near the end, a line was hastily written as if he had a premonition of something bad: "If anything happens to me, please believe that I have never betrayed my friendship with Vinh Toan. The person behind all this, I suspect, is the person he trusts the most. He is behind me."

Those words were like a needle piercing Anh Thu's heart. The person that Chu Vinh Toan trusts the most, after her father, could it be anyone other than someone from the Chu family?

The car swayed through the mountain passes, bringing her closer to Xuyen Giang city, where Chu Nguyen Group still stood tall after twenty-five years, where the secret of her father's unjust death was still buried somewhere between the ancient mansion walls. She looked down at the jade pendant half hidden in her collar, telling herself that from today, Do Thi Thu would be the only name she was allowed to bear, until the truth was revealed and her father's honor was returned.

The wind blew through the car door, carrying the smell of damp soil and the cold of a journey with an unknown destination, but in Anh Thu's heart, for the first time after a long night of loss, a fragile ray of hope began to rekindle. She did not know what lay ahead, who she would face, or whether she could find herself again as she headed toward Xuyen Giang and the Chu family mansion, the source of all tragedies.