Chapter 5 — The Secret Pages of Room Seven

A week has passed since Nhã Vân was admitted to the hospital under the name Lam, and during that time, she has gradually learned how to move like a shadow through the corridors of An Tâm Clinic — quiet enough so that no one will notice, but alert enough not to miss any details.

She began to pay attention to the notebooks placed at the nursing desk on each floor, where the schedule of examinations, room changes, and especially the "temporary hospital transfers" of some patients were recorded. Every time she passed by the duty desk at shift change time, when the nurses were busy handing over work, she tried to quickly glance at the open pages, remembering as many details as possible with her memory trained over many years of sitting in board meetings.

The first thing that made her pause was the number. According to the corporation's public records that she read before entering the hospital, the special isolation area only has a total of eight beds, for severe cases that require constant monitoring. But in the duty book, she counted at least twelve different patient codes mentioned within a week, some of which appeared only once and then completely disappeared from the pages of the book after that, as if the person carrying the code had never existed.

The second thing is the "special treatment surcharges" that appear scattered in invoices posted on the notice board for relatives of inpatients - not small amounts of money, vaguely noted with service codes that even someone who used to sit in the financial department of a medical group like her could not find out the specific meaning.

Nhã Vân brought those doubts to the next conversation with Mrs. Tu, a retired nurse with whom she had gradually built some trust.

"Mrs. Tu, have you noticed that there seem to be a lot of patients going in and out of the quarantine area? I heard that there are only eight beds in that area."

Mrs. Tu looked around, lowering her voice to a whisper. "You have a keen eye. When I first came here, I also found it strange. Some people came in and left very quickly, some people stayed for a long time and no one knew why. I once heard from an old nurse that there were cases where they only stayed in the hospital for a few days to do paperwork, then were taken somewhere, not discharged normally."

"Where are you taking it?"

Mrs. Tu shook her head, her eyes filled with fear. "I don't know, and I don't dare to ask more. Here, asking too many questions is not good for anyone, dear."

That sentence sent a chill down Nhã Vân's spine. A psychiatric hospital, even if private, still had to follow strict regulations on medical records, hospital transfers, and supervision by local health authorities. If patients "disappeared" from official records without a standard discharge procedure, this was no longer simply a matter of professional ethics among a few irresponsible individuals, but a sign of a deliberately operated system hiding something much larger.

She remembered Diệu Kỳ's case, remembered the unusual haste in bringing her sister to An Tâm itself instead of a neutral evaluation facility, remembered how Chu Bảo Hạnh always tried to delay every meeting between the two sisters. If Diệu Kỳ was simply a suspect in a criminal case, why was keeping her in strict quarantine so important to the people running the place?

That afternoon, during free exercise in the garden, Nhã Vân accidentally witnessed a scene that made her suspicions even more certain. A small truck without a hospital logo was parked at the back gate, a place usually used to transport logistics. Two men wearing security uniforms carried down several large, carefully sealed cartons, without normal medical labels such as medicine or supplies. A woman in a business suit, not a doctor's outfit, stood supervising the loading and unloading, holding a thick file in her hand, with an unusually urgent attitude.

Nhã Vân pretended to be reading a book on a nearby bench, glancing out of the corner of her eye, trying to memorize the license plate number and the woman's face. As the cartons were brought inside through a side door leading straight to the basement — an area that, according to public hospital plans, was only used to store old furniture and decommissioned archives — she felt a chill run down her spine.

Basement. Archived records have been discontinued. If it is as the name suggests, it must be a place to store harmless documents that are no longer of use. But the way those cartons were sealed and transported, with the close supervision of someone not part of the medical team, gave off an air of something much more important and secretive than a few stacks of old papers.

That night, she wrote down everything she observed in her codebook, her hands shaking slightly with both excitement and anxiety. She began to sketch out a general picture in her mind: patients who disappeared from records, vague surcharges, secret delivery vehicles into the basement at dusk, all seemed to be connected together into an organized network, operating silently under the cover of a humanitarian psychiatric clinic that her father had devoted his life to building.

She thought of Diệu Kỳ, lying motionless behind the door of the quarantine area, perhaps becoming an involuntary part of that picture without even knowing it. She thought of Chu Bảo Hạnh, the woman who always appeared with a warm smile and the promise of safety, and wondered if she knew anything about what was really going on under her management, or if she was just a pawn in a larger game that she could not yet see through.

Late at night, when the entire dormitory was asleep, Nhã Vân stood by her room window, looking down at the dark courtyard, the only security light casting a pale yellow halo on the walkway leading to the basement side door. She knew, even though she didn't know the whole truth, she was sure enough about one thing: Diệu Kỳ's case was not the starting point of everything, but just a link, perhaps the newest link, in a chain of secrets that had been buried for a long time inside the white walls of An Tâm Clinic.

And she knew, to find out the whole truth, she would need more than her solitary observation.

The next morning, before roll call, she stayed in the common room longer than usual, pretending to watch a TV program playing on the TV hanging in the corner of the wall, in fact to observe the working rhythm of the nurses at the beginning of the morning shift. She noticed a small but notable detail: every time someone from the administrative department walked past the living area to the isolation area, the nurses on duty automatically lowered their voices, changed the topic of conversation, and there was always someone who stood up and followed as if to supervise, to make sure no one accidentally spoke in front of strangers. It was not ordinary professional courtesy, but a trained reflex, a habit of vigilance that can only be developed when one was accustomed to having to hide something for long periods of time.

She also noticed that, among the nurses in the isolation ward, there was a young woman who always appeared more tense than her colleagues, often glancing towards the security camera before recording anything in the duty book. Nhã Vân silently gave her a unique name in her head — "the woman who often looks back" — and told herself that she would find a way to approach her at an appropriate time, when no one else was around, because her intuition told her that behind that tense look could be a person who was being forced to stay silent against her own will, not someone who voluntarily contributed to the shady things going on here.

That afternoon, when the group of patients in Ward B was led to the backyard for an outdoor lunch according to the weekly schedule, Nhã Vân deliberately slowed down at the end of the line, constantly observing the row of basement buildings hidden behind the trees. She counted at least two different entrances leading down to that area - an official entrance with a sign "Record Storage", and a side entrance hidden behind a row of large trash cans, without any signs, only an electronic lock with a red light signaling that it was always in a state of strict security. Whether an old record archive, no longer in use as it was officially called, needed two entrances with such different levels of security, was the question she carried with her all afternoon, until night fell and all the lights in the dormitory gradually turned off following the familiar curfew.