Chapter 9 — The Heiress's Selection of a Husband

The opportunity that Anh Thu had been waiting for weeks finally arrived on a Friday afternoon, when the whole mansion was abuzz with preparations for Chu Bach Dinh's long business trip to another city to negotiate a contract with a bank partner. She heard Ms. Mai tell her that the Vice President would be absent for three days, and the personal maid in charge of cleaning his house was also given leave at the same time because he had to return home for urgent work.

This was a rare opportunity that Anh Thu could not miss. She proactively asked Mrs. Xuan to let her take charge of cleaning Chu Bach Dinh's private residence during his absence, using the excuse of wanting to prove herself after the recent suspicious incident with Vinh Bach. Mrs. Xuan, who was lacking staff, did not have any doubts but immediately agreed, and also praised her for being diligent and proactive in her work.

That afternoon, Anh Thu carried a bucket of water, a broom and a rag, and entered Chu Bach Dinh's separate private house located far away from the main mansion, surrounded by a dense green fence like a discreet layer of protection. The house had a modern, cold style, different from the cozy look of the main mansion, with plain white walls with no family pictures, only a few lifeless expensive decorations.

His private office was located on the second floor, the door was locked with a modern digital lock. But Anh Thu had silently observed many days before and discovered that Bach Dinh's personal maid often kept a spare key in the drawer in the living room, using it to clean when necessary. She searched and quickly found the key, her hands shaking with excitement but still steadfast in carrying out her plan.

Inside the office, the space was neat to the point of being cold, with a black glass desk, a bookshelf full of hard-bound financial documents, and a steel filing cabinet hidden in the corner of the room. Ms. Thu locked the door from the inside to prevent anything from happening, then started searching as quickly as possible, clearly aware of the little time he had.

The steel filing cabinet was not locked, perhaps because Bach Dinh believed in the safety of this separate private house. She pulled out each drawer one by one, flipping through the files arranged by year, until she found a file that was much older than the others, with a yellowed cover, stored in the bottom drawer, hidden behind the recent files.

The file clearly dated twenty-five years ago, right around the time her father was falsely accused. Ms. Thu opened it, her hands trembling as she flipped through the discolored pages. Inside were copies of financial documents, transfer statements, and especially several pages with a signature believed to be Ton Dac Nghia's, confirming the transfer of a large sum of money out of the company account to an unknown personal account.

But when carefully comparing it with her father's real signature, which she had memorized through the notebook he left behind, Anh Thu immediately recognized the subtle differences. Although the signature in the file was ninety percent similar in overall shape, the pen strokes were stiffer and slower, lacking the natural seamlessness in the way her father used to sign, especially in the last hook of Nghia, which her father always extended into a characteristic wavy line that was difficult for any forger to imitate perfectly.

She flipped through a few more pages and found a scrap of paper stuck in the file, perhaps by mistake but not destroyed all these years. On the piece of paper were handwriting practices that repeated her father's signature, from the initial clumsiness to near perfection, and in the bottom corner of the piece of paper, a familiar abbreviation: "B.D."

Anh Thu's heart was beating rapidly, it felt like the whole world around her suddenly slowed down. This was the evidence she had been looking for many days, evidence confirming that it was Chu Bach Dinh, the paternal uncle of the three Chu brothers, who forged signatures and falsified records to falsely accuse her father of embezzling public funds, pushing her family into ruin for more than twenty years.

Ms. Thu sat down on the cold floor, her hand still clutching that fateful scrap of paper, her mind a mess. All these years, she still held a fragile hope that perhaps everything was just a misunderstanding, that maybe the person her father suspected was just a coincidence, a sad coincidence among countless other possibilities. But now, when the evidence was in her hands, all illusions finally disappeared, giving way to a sharp pain mixed with anger boiling in her chest.

She carefully placed the scrap of paper back in its original position in the file, not daring to bring the original with her for fear that Bach Dinh would immediately detect an intruder if his most important document disappeared. Instead, she carefully took pictures of every angle of the piece of paper, making sure every detail, no matter how small, was clearly recorded on her phone, before continuing to search deeper in the drawer.

She searched deeper in the drawer and discovered a small private notebook, which seemed to be Bach Dinh's work diary from his youth. She quickly flipped through the pages of the same year, reading a few lines that made her shiver: "My brother always trusted Dac Nghia more than me, entrusting him to manage the core capital flow while I was only left behind to support. If there is no way to eliminate him, my position in this group will forever be just the shadow of an outsider who is more important than blood and flesh."

Those lines full of spite and ambition were the clearest confession that Anh Thu could find, revealing the jealousy and desire for power that motivated Bach Dinh to harm his own brother's closest friend. She hastily took pictures of important pages with an old phone she bought at the second-hand market, her hands were shaking so much that she had to take pictures many times to get clear pictures.

Just as she was about to put the file back in its original position, the sound of a car engine rang out in the yard, accompanied by the sound of hurried footsteps. Anh Thu was startled and looked at the clock, realizing she had been so engrossed that she had completely forgotten the time. She hastily rearranged the files as they were, closed the drawer, turned off the light, then rushed out of the office, locked the door and put the spare key back in the right place in the living room drawer.

She just had time to hold a bucket of water and walk out the main door when she saw a strange car parked in front of the yard, not Bach Dinh's car but the car of another senior manager who came to look for documents he had forgotten. Anh Thu breathed a sigh of relief, bowed politely and quickly left that isolated private house, her heart still pounding because she had just experienced the most dangerous moment since she set foot in the Chu family mansion.

Returning to her small room, Anh Thu carefully locked the door, sat down on the floor, her whole body shaking with both fear and anger. She took out her phone and reviewed the photos she had just taken, each word and line was like a knife cutting into her heart. The person who took away her father's youth, honor and even his life turned out to be still living freely in this magnificent mansion, bearing the respected title of uncle of the man she was gradually falling in love with.

That night, Anh Thu couldn't sleep. She sat by the window, looking out at the starry night sky, wondering whether she should act immediately, bring this evidence to confront Chu Bach Dinh directly, or need to patiently collect more to have a complete picture, enough to convince the entire Chu family to believe in the truth. She understood that if she acted hastily, not only would her plan fail, but her own life could also be in danger from a man who did not hesitate to destroy an entire family because of greed and jealousy.

She thought of the fake calm face Bach Dinh often showed in front of his brother and grandchildren, of the respect the whole family had for him over the years while the dark truth was buried so carefully. The more she thought about it, the more Anh Thu felt startled by this person's sophisticated ability to cover up, and she understood that without careful and solid preparation in terms of evidence and witnesses, once she came forward to denounce, Bach Dinh could completely turn the situation around, turning her from an accuser into a slanderer, or worse, find a way to make her disappear before the truth could reach anyone else in the family.

She opened her father's notebook and wrote a new line below the old notes: "There is the first evidence: a piece of paper for practicing signatures, a diary recording motives. Need to find more living witnesses, people who worked in the accounting department when father was in office. Must be extra cautious from now on." After writing, she closed the notebook, hugged it tightly as if embracing the last remaining warmth from the father she never had the chance to meet, then fell asleep in a fitful sleep filled with broken dreams about the past that had never been fully told.