That afternoon, the wind was still.
The air seemed frozen. Time stood still.

An sat in an old teahouse, holding a crackled ceramic cup, silently watching the tea seep into the hairline fractures. Outside, Saigon was still as noisy as ever—but in her mind, only one image remained: Linh.

The girl who had entered An’s life like a breeze.
Gentle. Yet cold. Soothing. Yet dangerously quiet.

The girl who once said she wanted to stay by An like a shadow… but over time, seemed to want to become An. Not to walk beside her—but to replace her.

An remembered Linh’s gaze from those days—the look that wasn’t quite envy, nor admiration. It was something between jealousy and the longing to possess.

Linh didn’t want to be An’s friend. Linh wanted to become a “better” version of her—prettier, more Western, more successful, more loved, and… more remembered.

An had once felt angry. Bitter. Disgusted—seeing Linh as someone without roots, someone who abandoned her identity to chase the imported shine of secondhand dreams.

But today—with everything settled—she no longer felt angry.

Because now she understood.

Linh wasn’t like Nguyên—a man swallowed by the past and ideology to the point of losing himself without realizing.

Linh, on the contrary, was fully aware.

She knew exactly what she was doing. She understood the price. And still, she chose to pay.

Linh chose to live like a Westerner—not because she was one, but because she wanted to be loved like one. To be desired like one. To belong in their gleaming world.

She trained herself to change her voice, her walk, her makeup, her eyes—even her smile—to resemble the foreign women in French films.
She wore their dresses, painted her lips like theirs, and loved their men.

An had once thought it was filthy, traitorous, self-destructive.

But now… she only felt sad.

“Maybe she loves the things I never could,” An whispered to herself.

Linh didn’t want to be herself—because herself wasn’t glamorous enough. Not chosen enough. Not loved enough.

She wanted to be An.
But not the An as she was—
She wanted to be an “improved” An: an An with visibly Western blood, a Western body, a Western romance, a Western future.

An that… An had never been.

An looked out the window. A foreign couple walked by, holding hands, laughing. She smiled—a faint smile, like fading tea smoke.

“You wanted to replace me, Linh?” she murmured.
“Then take it all. Take the worst parts too. Take the deepest wounds. Take even the memories that were erased from me.”

She closed her eyes briefly. Then opened them and wrote a line in her worn leather notebook:

“If you truly want to become me,
Then bear ten times what I’ve endured.
You once thought I was pitiful.
So now, I hope the world loves you—
In the way it pitied and despised me.”

It wasn’t a curse. It was a release.

An no longer needed Linh to pay.
Because, in truth—Linh already had.

The cost of losing your identity is emptiness.
The cost of loving a world that won’t accept you is loneliness.
The cost of becoming a replacement is never being loved as yourself.

Linh now—might look very Western.
But perhaps… no one truly sees her as Western.

And perhaps no one remembers that she was once a Vietnamese girl—
Once knew the taste of fish sauce,
Once spoke her mother tongue,
Once understood the meaning of heart.

An picked up her phone and sent a short message:

“Linh,
I forgive you.
Because you didn’t take anything from me.
You only took what you’ll never be able to keep.
And I no longer want to hold onto them either.
Your world is beautiful—
I just hope you’re strong enough when it turns its back on you.”

There was no reply. But An didn’t need one.

She had forgiven.

Not because Linh deserved it.
But because An deserved to feel light again.

That night, An dreamed a strange dream.

She saw Linh standing in the middle of Paris, wearing a white dress, spinning in the crowd.
But Linh’s eyes… were those of someone who had gone too far to find the way back.

An walked toward her, ready to call out.

But Linh didn’t hear.

She just stood there, spinning endlessly—
Like a wind-up doll in a music box no one opened anymore.

An woke in the middle of the night.
Alone.
But lighter than ever before.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting.
It means refusing to let the past clutch your throat and drag you back into the abyss.

And An had done it.

Because she understood—not everyone who betrays is cruel.

Some betray… because they are too weak before the glitter.

And they, in the end, must live with that glitter forever—
Without ever touching the light.