Linh Nguyet had no idea how she made it back to her room.
Her mind was a storm of confusion, memories breaking apart and crashing into each other like tangled webs. She could still hear Luc Trac's voice echoing in her head:
"Until the day you truly choose to stay."
But how could she choose anything… when she didn't even know who she really was?
The next morning, the sky was strangely clear after days of rain.
Sunlight filtered through the window, but it brought no warmth. Instead, it lit up every speck of dust on the wooden furniture — like exposing time itself, and the secrets buried beneath it.
She began searching. Quietly. Relentlessly.
If she had truly died in this house — if she had once loved, once wed — then there had to be somewhere her body was kept.
A grave. A coffin. A secret, long hidden.
The old maid said nothing at first. As usual, she moved like a shadow. But when Linh Nguyet asked about any burial site on the estate grounds, the woman's eyes flickered with fear.
"You shouldn't go there," she whispered — the first words she had spoken in days. "Not all truths of the dead are meant for the living."
"But I'm not just a living person," Linh Nguyet replied calmly, her voice sharper than steel. "Am I?"
The graveyard was hidden beyond the woods behind the mansion — untended, overgrown.
No headstones. No names. Just a half-buried black coffin, covered in tangled vines and ash-colored soil.
Faded letters were carved into the lid:
"Nguyet Linh."
It wasn't her name.
Yet the moment she touched the wooden surface, her heart began to pound wildly — as if some invisible thread inside her had snapped taut.
She peeled the vines away, hands trembling.
And she opened it.
Inside was a corpse in a wedding dress.
White lace. A veil. The exact same dress she had seen in the basement.
The body was shriveled, skin stretched tight over bone. But disturbingly — the lips were still curled into a faint smile.
A cold, eerie smile.
So chilling that Linh Nguyet staggered backward.
But her eyes couldn't look away from the corpse's still-open eyes.
White. Hollow. Staring directly at her, as if it recognized the person standing before it.
"Don't look into her eyes."
A low, icy voice spoke from behind.
She turned sharply.
Luc Trac.
He stood still, expressionless — but not angry, not mournful.
Just… waiting.
"That's who you were," he said. "The woman I couldn't protect."
"Why bury her here? No gravestone? No ceremony?"
"Because they wanted to erase your existence." His voice was bitter. "But I didn't let them. Even when your soul scattered… even when your body withered… I wouldn't let anyone take you from me."
Linh Nguyet knelt beside the coffin.
She didn't know why, but tears began to fall silently.
Not from fear.
But from grief.
That girl in the coffin — whether she was "a part" of her or someone long gone — had once loved. Once lived. Once waited in vain.
"You know…" she whispered, "keeping a soul trapped is just another way of killing it."
Luc Trac didn't respond.
He simply stepped forward and gently closed the coffin lid.
"I only wanted you to see," he said. "To understand why I can't let go."
Then he looked at her. His voice softened.
"And you? Do you still want to run?"
Linh Nguyet stood.
She didn't answer right away.
She walked over, placed her hand atop the coffin.
And whispered:
"If I really was that girl…
Then let me be the one to bury the past myself."