Paris at dusk.
The sky bled amber—soft yet searing—like it had heard too many names whispered and never answered.
Linh walked the backstreets, each step peeling away another thread from the fabric of the past.
In her pocket, the handkerchief embroidered with H burned against her skin, heavier than any stone.
Back in her rented flat, she unfolded it again. Staring. Tracing. Breathing with it.
H.
Not just a letter. A cipher. A seed. A promise no one else had ever tried to keep.
Her mind circled the dossier again:
"Subject H-01 may trigger recovered memory if returned to original environment."
Was Huyền a random survivor? Or was she the spark Mai had protected with her own disappearance?
She remembered the way Huyền had looked at her once—not confused, not grateful. Almost like… recognition.
Like a name trying to claw its way back from beneath layers of dust.
The next morning, Linh bought a ticket to a town not found in any tourist guide—south of Paris, near the forests no one cared to map.
The journalist had hinted once, in a voice thick with warning: "If you want more, find the one they call the Gardener."
Not a real name. A myth born from those who lived between systems—the ones who had planted seeds of resistance even in poisoned ground.
The greenhouse appeared at the end of a cracked stone path. Wild vines strangled the glass walls, ivy curling like veins.
She hesitated at the gate. Then pushed through.
Inside, the air was thick with green things: jasmine, marigold, old soil, old breath.
An old man hunched over a broken bed of rosemary didn't look up.
"You carry grief like smoke," he said.
Linh froze.
"You're looking for M-07," he continued, pulling weeds like plucking sins from memory. "But you should be looking for the seed she planted."
"I found her cloth," Linh whispered.
The Gardener finally turned. His eyes weren't blind—but something deeper: eyes that had looked too long at things others turned away from.
"You found the thread," he said. "But do you know who held the needle?"
"I don't understand."
He wiped his hands on an old rag.
"Mai wasn't alone. There were others—scattered survivors who chose exile over betrayal. Some planted names. Some buried them."
He pointed at a vine wrapped around a cracked pillar.
"Survival isn't always noble. Sometimes, survival means burying names twice—once by enemies, once by friends too afraid to remember."
Linh clutched the handkerchief tighter.
"What happened to H-01?" she asked.
The Gardener's mouth tightened.
"She was supposed to forget. That was the agreement. Forget and live. But if she starts to remember—"
He stopped.
"What happens?" Linh pressed.
The wind rattled the greenhouse.
He answered quietly:
"Then someone will come. Not to rescue her. Not to protect her. To erase her."
That night, Linh sat by a cracked fountain behind the greenhouse.
The moon hung low—heavy and bruised—like a coin flipped by unseen hands.
In her lap, two relics: Mai's cloth, stitched with trembling M. And Huyền's cloth, stitched with shaking H.
Two lives. Two promises. Two fragile witnesses no one else remembered.
Her mind drifted—Back to the night Mai had pushed her onto that truck, whispering: "Don't look back."
Back to the shelter where Hoa had written her first trembling "H" on a blank page.
Back to Huyền, staring across the cracked café table, a look that was not confusion but almost... homesickness.
Maybe memory wasn't a prison. Maybe it was a doorway—left ajar by those brave enough to disobey forgetting.
Maybe some doors weren't meant to be locked forever.
Linh opened her notebook.
She wrote:
"If M-07 lived, If H-01 breathes, Then the girl with the stitched H is not just another survivor. She is the last page Mai dared to leave unwritten."
She closed the notebook with a soft snap. Like sealing a vow.
Tomorrow, she would call Huyền.
No more running. No more silence.
Only the truth—even if it shatters everything.
As she tucked the handkerchiefs back into her jacket, her phone vibrated against her thigh.
Unknown number. No message.
Just a call.
The screen flickered.
And somewhere beyond the static—
She thought she heard breathing.