Chapter 6 — The Heiress's Selection of a Husband

That weekend, Mrs. Xuan assigned Anh Thu a task that she had secretly been looking forward to for a long time: cleaning up the old storage room located in the east house, which Mrs. Mai had mentioned was the oldest house in the entire mansion grounds. "No one has cleaned this room for a long time. It's full of old furniture and documents from the house from the time my great-grandfather left it. Just clean it thoroughly. If anything is broken, put it in a separate corner. Don't throw anything away without asking, understand?"

Anh Thu nodded, trying to hide the excitement welling up in her heart. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for since the day she set foot in the mansion, a space that preserves the memories of the Chu family for many generations, where traces related to her father may very well remain.

The heavy wooden door made a squeaking sound as she pushed it open, a stream of musty air mixed with the smell of old paper rushed out. The room was large but filled with furniture: wooden chests inlaid with mother-of-pearl, antique tables and chairs covered with white cloth, stacked cardboard boxes that had turned yellow over the years. The only light entered from a small window covered with cobwebs, creating faint streaks of light through the dust suspended in the air.

She started her work from the corner of the room near the window, cleaning each item meticulously but her eyes were still constantly searching, looking for anything that could be related to the past that Mrs. Lien had told about. After nearly two hours of cleaning up unimportant items, Anh Thu discovered a wooden chest that was smaller than the other chests, the brass lock was rusty but no longer locked tightly, hidden behind an old filing cabinet.

She gently opened the lid of the chest, inside were dozens of leather-bound photo albums, arranged in chronological order carefully noted on the spine with the years and months. Her heart beat faster when she realized that the year line on an album matched the period Mrs. Lien had mentioned, twenty-five years ago.

She pulled out the album, her hands trembling as she flipped through the pages. Black and white photos and some yellowed color photos record the events of the early Chu Nguyen Group: the groundbreaking ceremony for the headquarters, celebration parties, and formal shareholder meetings. And then, between those pages of photos, she stopped in front of a photo that made her whole body cold.

In the photo were two young men, probably just over twenty-five, standing in front of the gate of the mansion that Anh Thu saw with her own eyes not long ago, although at that time it was newer, without the moss of time. A person with a sharp face and eyes full of ambition was Chu Vinh Toan in his youth, whom she recognized through the lines still looming on his old face today. The other person, with a gentle face, a bright smile, his arm around his close friend's shoulder, had familiar features that Anh Thu had only seen through an old photo that Mrs. Lien had kept for many years.

She flipped the photo back and saw the faded ink handwriting: "Vinh Toan and Dac Nghia, inauguration day of new headquarters, June." Anh Thu squeezed the photo in her hand, tears suddenly flowing out of her eyes uncontrollably. This was her father, Ton Dac Nghia, present in the flesh in the photo frame, no longer a strange name in the notebook or Mrs. Lien's story.

What shocked her even more was the small detail on the collars of the two men in the photo: both wore identical lotus-shaped jade pendants, with only a few natural stone veins differing. Anh Thu tremblingly reached into her shirt, took out half of the jade pendant that Mrs. Lien had given her last night, and placed it next to the image in the photo for comparison. The shape, color, and grain of the stone all match down to the smallest detail.

So the truth had been confirmed. Her father and Chu Vinh Toan were once such close friends that they ordered a pair of jade pendants as brotherly tokens, a symbol of a deep friendship that no one expected to end in the tragedy of betrayal and harm. Anh Thu sat down on the dusty floor, held the photo in her arms, letting the tears she had held back for many years flow freely in the quiet space of the storage room.

She flipped through a few more pages of the album and found many other photos of her father appearing next to Chu Vinh Toan, at meetings, on business trips, and even a photo taken with a young woman that she guessed was her mother, Vu Thi Hien, standing next to another young and beautiful woman that she later realized was Lam Ngoc Dung in her teenage years. The two families were once so close that the wives also interacted emotionally like sisters.

Just as Anh Thu was engrossed in the shocking discoveries, the sound of cheerful whistling footsteps rang out in the hallway, getting closer and closer. She was startled to realize that it was the familiar whistling voice of Chu Vinh Phong, who often came to this area to find old items for the corporation's nostalgic media campaigns.

She quickly stuffed the photo into her pocket, closed the lid of the trunk, stood up and brushed the dust off her clothes, trying to regain as normal a face as possible. The door opened and Vinh Phong walked in, holding an old film camera, his face smiling as usual.

"Hey, is there someone here? You're Thu, right, the new one?" Vinh Phong asked, his voice friendly and not at all guarded.

"Yes, I am cleaning the room according to Mrs. Xuan's orders." Anh Thu replied, trying to keep her voice calm even though her heart was still pounding.

"You cleaned this room very carefully. This room hasn't been touched in a long time. The dust must be an inch thick." Vinh Phong smiled, walked closer to another cabinet, searched for something that seemed related to his work, completely ignoring Anh Thu's slightly pale face. "By the way, have you seen any old photo albums? I'm looking for documentary photos for the group's twenty-fifth anniversary campaign."

That question almost startled Anh Thu, revealing her vulnerability, but she promptly calmed down. "Yes, I saw a few books in the corner chest there, but I haven't dared to open them because I'm afraid of damaging old things in the house."

"Let me see." Vinh Phong walked to the chest, opened the lid and glanced through a few albums. Luckily, he only stopped at the more recent ones, not the one Anh Thu had just looked at, perhaps because she accidentally put it upside down at the bottom when she hastily put it back. "Okay, let me borrow some of these books, please continue cleaning, thank you."

After Vinh Phong left, Anh Thu stood silently in the middle of the dusty room, clutching the photo in her pocket as if afraid it would disappear. She had in her hands the first evidence confirming the connection between her father and the Chu family, an important step forward on the journey to find the truth. But along with that hope came a new fear: if there was even a moment of delay, a small mistake like just now, her true identity could be discovered at any time, by the people living right in the very house she was trying to sneak into.

Before leaving the archive room, Anh Thu had time to flip through the last few pages of the album, where she found another photo of her father standing next to a desk full of books, holding a pen and signing a document, behind him was a bronze sign engraved with the words "Central Accounting Department". She remembered this detail carefully, guessing that this could be the forerunner of the finance department that Chu Bach Dinh was now in charge of managing. If there was indeed a calculated transfer of power behind the murder in the past, then this was the origin of all conspiracies.

She carefully put the other albums back in their original positions in the trunk, making sure to leave no trace that anyone had rummaged through them. Her hands trembled slightly as she closed the lid, not because of fatigue after many hours of cleaning, but because of the weight of the truth that had just been revealed. She stood up, looked around the dusty room again, feeling like every old item here was whispering a part of her family's tragic story, a story that only she, in this entire large mansion, could fully understand.

That night, returning to her small room, Anh Thu carefully hid the photo in the lining of a cloth bag, next to her father's notebook. She lay down on the bed, looked up at the ceiling, and in her mind appeared the image of two young men smiling brightly together in front of the mansion gate, wearing the same pair of trust jade pendants. She wondered, in the midst of that close friendship, what caused everything to collapse in the blink of an eye, and whether the person behind it all, the name B.D. that her father had mentioned in the notebook, was really Chu Bach Dinh as she suspected. The answer, she knew, still lay deep in the hidden corners of this mansion, waiting for her to patiently discover little by little.