Chapter 8 — The Watch Repair Shop That Doesn't Sell Time

Minh opened the shop earlier than usual to repair Mr. Sáu's pocket watch, but his hand kept stopping on the back cover. The morning light was still pale, not warm enough to dispel the remaining coldness in the night air. He put down the watch, got up to make another pot of tea, then sat down again without touching it again.

Lan sat at the next table, listening to the recording through headphones. The man's voice in the tape was even and cold: "Hoo, hand her over. No one needs to know about tonight's shipment," Hòa replied: "She is a person, not a commodity." Then there was the sound of metal banging, the sound of running, then silence. Lan rewound that passage three times, each time stopping at her father's words, trying to hear some nuance in his voice—fear, determination, or both at the same time.

The recording was only two minutes long, but heavy enough to hang in Lan's head all morning, and enough for a lawyer to confirm it could be evidence if the source could be identified. Tùng sent a copy to a labor support organization. They needed more lists of names, especially the number of people passing through the wagons.

Lan asked Minh why Mr. Sáu didn't announce everything. Minh said Mr. Sáu tried, but the only person who dared to sign the petition was Hạ. When the application was returned because "not enough people confirmed it", Hạ disappeared. Mr. Sáu chose to keep the documents safe, waiting for the insider to return.

“He waited too long,” Lan said.

“He feared protecting evidence would turn into protecting silence.”

“And I'm waiting too.”

Minh did not deny it. He took out the back cover of the watch and placed it on the cloth. Inside is a felt ring with traces of absorbed sweat. The watch stopped at 16:42 but the wheel was not stuck. Just a drop of oil, it can run.

“What did your father leave behind?” Lan asked.

"Not my father. Mr. Sáu."

“The one who taught you.”

"He saved me from becoming a watchmaker just to hide from everyone. When my father died, I dropped out of school and worked every job. Mr. Sáu gave me a magnifying glass, saying that if you want to look closely, you must be able to bear what you see," Minh said that the day Mr. Sáu passed away, he gave him the watch but did not tell him to fix it. He just said: "There are memories that need a listener, not an editor." Minh put it in a drawer, afraid of hearing his father's voice or his own voice.

There were nights when he opened the drawer, looked at the watch lying still under the table lamp, put his hand on the back cover and then pulled it back. He told himself he didn't have enough time, not enough courage, not the right time—reasons he'd been repeating to himself for twelve years until they no longer sounded like reasons, but like a mantra to delay.

Lan asked him if he regretted it. “Yes,” Minh replied. "But regret isn't enough reason to turn on the clock. Sometimes it's just our way of continuing to punish ourselves."

Near noon, Tùng arrived with a thick file of documents, his eyes still dark because he stayed up late reading documents. The labor organization found three people on Hạ's list. One person has passed away, two people are still alive but are afraid of revealing their names. They need to meet privately, don't want the press. Lan offered to go with her, but Tùng objected because she was not an investigator.

“Neither am I,” Lan said. “But I read the file without telling anyone.”

“You always do things without thinking about the consequences.”

“And you always think for so long that the consequences happen on their own.”

Minh placed the screwdriver between the two of them. "You two don't need to choose who is right. Just agree on which tasks cannot be done alone."

They divided the work. Tùng contacted a lawyer, Lan arranged Hạ's statement, and Minh examined the evidence. When Lan gave the watch to him, Minh discovered a gear with a new cut. Someone tried to stop it at 16:42 before giving it back to Hòa.

“This is not a natural error,” he said. “The clock breaker knew what he was doing.”

In the nylon thread, he found a piece of green dust similar to the paint color of the Vạn Thành warehouse. The analysis is inconclusive but enough to raise questions: the watch was in storage before falling onto the tracks, a small detail but enough to shake the entire initial theory that it simply fell out in the chaos.

Lan listened to the tape again and discovered that before the banging sound there was a sound like a bell. Minh checked the book and realized that the bell at that time was running eight minutes behind the station's time. So 16:42 on the clock may correspond to 16:50 in reality.

“My father didn't leave the station at 4:50 p.m.,” Lan said. “You were locked in the warehouse at 16:42 clock time.”

“And the person who broke the clock wanted everyone to believe a different time.”

The truth suddenly took shape. Not magic, not a call from the past, but a small trick enough to skew the story fifteen years.

Lan sat quietly for a moment, letting that thought sink in. She once imagined the truth would come like a bolt of lightning, blinding and immediate. But it came about this way — each little piece, each eight-minute difference, each number pieced together by people who didn't know each other. Maybe that's how truth has always worked: without flashiness, just patiently waiting for enough people to contribute enough pieces.

In the afternoon, Lan returned to the hospital to tell Mrs. Hạnh about Hạ's story. Mrs. Hạnh doesn't remember the name but recognizes the green rope. “Hòa told me not to wait,” she said. “I heard he doesn't want to come home.”

Lan held her mother's hand. “Did he say he was coming back?”

Mrs. Hạnh closed her eyes and tried to find it. "He said: if I don't return before the train changes tracks, please take Lan away from the station."

"Why?"

“Because people will ask what she saw.”

Lan looked at Tùng. The two sisters understood that their father tried to protect them, but the way he did it made their mother bear all the fear. There was no perfect hero in the story; There were only people who choose one good thing and forget another good thing, then had to live with the consequences of that choice for the rest of their lives.

Minh went back to the shop and placed the pocket watch under the lamp. He put a drop of oil on the shaft. The second hand moves, passes 16:42, then stops at 16:43. Minh turned off the lights before hearing the sound.

He wasn't ready, but for the first time the back cover was no longer a wall. It's just a door, and the door can be opened the moment you're brave enough.

That night, Lan made a time table on the computer: 16:42 warehouse time, 16:50 station time, 21:10 secondary road. She colored each source of evidence, clearly stating which were memories, which were documents, and which were testimonies. Tùng calls it the "mistake-proof board", because for too many years people have put the pieces in the wrong place and blamed each other for the painting.

Minh sent a photo of the gear to a friend who specializes in mechanical inspection. Preliminary results showed that the cut was made by old watch repair pliers, the same type Mr. Sáu used. This does not incriminate Mr. Sáu; It only proves that the person who broke the watch once went to a factory with someone who knew the job.

Lan doesn't want to doubt Minh's teacher. Minh said suspicion is not an accusation. “If we don't check who we trust, we're just protecting a comfortable story.”

That sentence made Lan silent for a moment. She realized that her own family had lived in a comfortable story for fifteen years — father left, mother stayed, no one needed to dig deeper. That comfort gave them a way to continue living, but also robbed them of the opportunity to understand each other properly.

Tùng placed next to the time table a photo of Uncle Thanh. In the corner of the photo there is a clock hanging in the warehouse, the hands are eight minutes slow. That slow rhythm is like the way someone adjusts the entire room to falsify testimony.

They agreed that tomorrow morning they would find the person who held the warehouse key. No one goes alone. No one brought the original. No one promises witnesses that the truth will immediately make their lives better.

Before leaving the shop, Tùng stopped to look at the time table Lan had just created, then looked at his sister. “Do you realize, we're doing exactly what dad used to do — gathering evidence, protecting witnesses, not over-promising?” Lan did not answer immediately. She looked down at the words on the screen, and for the first time felt like she was continuing something of her father's, instead of just tracing his footsteps.

The silver watch was placed in the box, the second hand ticking steadily. Lan closed the phone, realizing that a day had passed and she was no longer counting the hours waiting for her father. She is counting things to do for others.

She turned off the desk lamp and sat a while longer in the dim darkness of the shop, listening to the overlapping ticking of hundreds of clocks on the wall. There was a strange comfort in that chaotic sound — none of them were in tune, but all were moving, all were living on despite the cracks and unfinished repairs. Lan thinks perhaps a family also operates that way: it doesn't need to be at the same pace, just as long as no one stands still forever.