Chapter 3: A Distance Called Fear

In the days that followed, An gradually settled into the slow rhythm of Book Street. She helped Khiêm run the bookshop, rearranged the old shelves, and greeted the regulars who still came by every day. There was the old flower seller at the top of the street who kept asking after “Mrs. Tâm’s granddaughter,” and the high school boy who still came every week to borrow reference books. All of it made An feel as if she had never left.

But between her and Khiêm, the distance was still there, thin but distinct, like a pane of clear glass between two people standing very close together.

One evening, after the shop had closed, Khiêm asked An to stay for a simple dinner he had cooked himself. They sat across from each other at the little wooden table in the corner of the shop, the yellow lamplight falling softly over them.

“How long are you planning to stay?” Khiêm asked, trying to keep his voice even, but An could hear the tension hidden in the question.

“I don’t know yet,” she answered honestly. “I still have unfinished work back in the other city, but I don’t want to rush off again either.”

“This time you won’t leave without saying goodbye, will you?” Khiêm asked, trying to slip a little humor into it, but his eyes were strangely serious.

An could feel the hurt beneath the question, even though Khiêm had tried to hide it with a light tone.

“I’m sorry about back then,” she said, her voice choked. “I shouldn’t have left like that. I shouldn’t have made you and Grandma wait in silence all those years.”

“Why did you leave?” Khiêm asked. The question he had held back for ten years finally slipped out. “I always wondered what I did wrong.”

An took a deep breath. She knew the time had come to face the truth she had buried for too long.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, her voice shaking. “I was the one who was afraid. I was afraid that if I stayed, I’d realize how I felt about you. And I was afraid that if that happened, I’d lose myself. That I wouldn’t be the independent An I’d been trying so hard to become.”

Khiêm was silent, his eyes fixed on her, unable to hide how moved he was.

“And now?” he asked softly. “Are you still afraid of that?”

An looked at Khiêm for a long time, into the eyes that had shared so many summers of her youth, that had waited for her through ten long years without a single complaint.

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “But I know I don’t want to keep running.”

Saying it felt like setting down a burden that had weighed on her shoulders for years. Khiêm reached out and gently took the hand she had resting on the table. A simple gesture, but it held so much that didn’t need to be said.

“I won’t push you to decide right now,” he said gently. “But I want you to know that what I feel for you has never changed, even after ten years.”

That night, after Khiêm went home, An sat alone in the attic room and read the fifth letter under the desk lamp.

This letter was different from the others. Her grandmother’s words sounded weaker, but they held a story An had never heard: the story of her grandmother’s own first love, a man she had left out of the same kind of fear as An, and the regret she had carried for the rest of her life for not being brave enough to go back in time.

“I’m telling you this story,” she wrote, “not so you’ll repeat my mistake, but so you’ll understand that some chances in life only come once. I don’t want you to live with regret the way I did.”

An folded the letter, tears rolling down her cheeks. For the first time, she understood why her grandmother had always encouraged her friendship with Khiêm, always found ways to let the two children be close every summer. She had been trying to keep her granddaughter from following in her own footsteps.