The following evening, the Mekong Restaurant felt busier than it had for days—not because of tourists, but because familiar faces were gradually finding their way back to the riverside tables they had occupied for years.
Juan arrived shortly after Laurent. Vincent was already there. Dean and John were finishing their first Saigon Beer. Behind the counter, Lý acknowledged them before returning to his work.
“Looks like we’re early,” Laurent observed.
“Give it ten minutes,” Vincent replied. “They always arrive eventually.”
Almost on cue, Andrew appeared. His Vietnamese wife came in beside him, exchanging a few words with Lý before joining the group.
“It’s been too long,” Andrew said as he greeted everyone in turn.
“You’ve been keeping busy,” Juan replied.
“My wife says I spend too much time at home.”
She laughed. “He’s finally learning.”
A taxi stopped outside the restaurant. Jimmy R. stepped out, paid the driver and waited for his change before crossing the pavement.
“Am I the last one?”
“So far,” Dean answered.
Jimmy sat down. “I’ve been hearing rumours.”
Vincent looked at him. “In Cần Thơ?”
Jimmy spread his hands. “Where else?”
“What sort of rumours?” Juan asked.
“That you’ve started finding answers.”
Juan chose his words carefully. “We’ve started asking better questions.”
Jimmy considered that. “So things really have changed.”
“They have.”
Andrew rested his bottle on the table. “I still remember the police interviews.”
“So do I,” Jimmy replied. “They wanted to know where we’d been, who we’d spoken to, what we’d noticed.”
Dean looked around the table. “Back then, none of us understood what they were really looking for.”
“No,” Juan agreed. “We didn’t.”
For a moment, everyone drifted back to the previous year—hours spent at the police station, the same questions repeated in different ways, the same uncertainty each of them carried home afterwards. At the time, it had felt like the end of the story. Now it seemed more like the beginning.
Juan looked around the table. The faces had changed little. Only the conversations had. A year earlier they had been trying to explain a disappearance. Now they were trying to understand the man who had disappeared.
For a while, the conversation drifted towards familiar subjects: work, traffic, the endless roadworks around the city, the latest rumours circulating among the expatriate community.
Lý appeared beside the table with a notepad already in his hand. He looked at each of them expectantly.
Dean pointed to his half-full bottle. “Another one.” Lý scribbled something. Andrew ordered a Heineken. Jimmy asked for Tiger Beer. Lý frowned. Jimmy repeated it more slowly. Lý stared at him for a second, then wrote again before disappearing towards the counter without a word.
Vincent watched him leave. “I still don’t know whether he understands English, or just pretends not to.”
Laurent laughed quietly. “I’m not sure he understands Vietnamese either.”
A few minutes later Lý returned. He placed two beers on the table, another beer, and a bottle of sparkling water.
Jimmy looked at the bottle. “I ordered a bottle of Tiger Beer.” Lý glanced at it, then at Jimmy. Without changing expression, he picked it up again and walked away.
Dean shook his head. “Nothing changes.”
“Nothing,” Andrew agreed. “It wouldn’t feel like the Mekong otherwise.”
Juan waited until Lý had disappeared into the kitchen. “All right. Back to Phong.”
The conversation settled immediately.
Andrew leaned forward. “I’ve been thinking about something since last year. The police interviewed all of us. At the time, I thought they were just trying to build a timeline.”
Juan folded his hands together. “So did I. But now?”
Andrew hesitated. “Now I wonder whether they already suspected this wasn’t an ordinary disappearance.”
Jimmy rested his elbows on the table. “If they did, they never told us.”
“No.” Juan’s reply came calmly. “They couldn’t.”
Laurent looked from one face to another. “Either they had no evidence, or they had too much.”
The distinction lingered in everyone’s mind. Neither possibility was reassuring.
Dean rested his bottle on the table. “I’ve been thinking about something. We keep talking about Cambodia. But I don’t think that’s how Phong would have seen it.”
Laurent understood immediately. “No. His world had always been here.”
Andrew looked at him. “He told you much about those years?”
“Only in fragments. He left Mỹ Tú when he was young. Like so many others. He went wherever there was work.”
Jimmy listened with interest. “Where?”
Laurent counted them off almost absent-mindedly: “Đồng Nai. Bình Dương. Sài Gòn. Vĩnh Long. Cà Mau. And eventually Cần Thơ. He worked in restaurants almost everywhere he went. But once he arrived in Cần Thơ, everything changed.”
Andrew smiled. “Kim Mới.”
Laurent returned the smile. “Exactly. He stopped looking for somewhere else.”
Dean turned towards Juan. “Do you remember what Phong told you a few days before he disappeared?”
Juan took a moment before answering. “He mentioned a friend. The two of them had met for coffee near Bình Thủy Market.”
Laurent listened carefully. “The one who offered him a job?”
Juan agreed. “Yes. In Cambodia. A hotel in Siem Reap. Good salary. Three times what he was earning at the Mekong.”
Jimmy looked surprised. “I don’t remember you telling us that.”
“I didn’t. At the time, it didn’t seem important.”
Andrew frowned. “Did he ever mention his friend’s name?”
Juan gave a slight shake of his head. “If he did, I don’t remember it. My Vietnamese wasn’t any better then than it is now. And Phong knew that.”
Dean reflected for a moment. “So Cambodia wasn’t completely unknown to him.”
“No,” Juan replied. “He knew it existed. He’d even thought about taking the job. But thinking about crossing a border and actually crossing it are two very different things.”
Laurent rested his hands on the table. “Everything he really knew was here—the roads, the ferries, the villages, the markets, the churches, the little restaurants, the Delta.”
Andrew looked thoughtful. “That explains something. When Liên described the journey, she remembered Phong watching everything.”
Andrew nodded. “Because that was what he’d always done. He was searching for something familiar.”
Dean slowly turned his bottle between his hands. “A road. A canal. A church. A market. Anything.”
Juan completed the thought. “He wasn’t trying to recognise Cambodia. He was trying to recognise the Vietnam he knew. And when nothing matched, he must have realised that he’d been taken beyond the only world he had ever called home.”
For a while, the conversation lingered on that thought. None of them knew what Phong had seen during those final hours. But they all knew the kind of man he was—patient, observant, practical. The sort of man who never stopped trying to understand his surroundings. And perhaps that was exactly why he had entrusted Liên with the phone and the token before they were separated.
The conversation drifted onto other subjects: work, football, the price of beer, the latest rumours about another supermarket opening across the river. It felt good. For a little while, the mystery surrounding Phong no longer dominated the table.
Dean glanced around the restaurant. “It’s strange. I’ve been coming here for years, and yet each of us knew a different Phong.”
Juan looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“You knew the man who stayed after closing time.” He looked towards Laurent. “You knew the colleague. Andrew knew the customer who always recommended a particular dish. John probably knew the mechanic. Jimmy knew the friend.” He looked towards Mr Hoàng. “And you knew the employee.”
Laurent considered that. “None of us knew the whole man.”
“No,” Dean agreed. “We only knew the version that crossed our own path.”
Juan remained thoughtful. “His parents knew a son. Kim Mới knew a husband. Thọng Hiếu and Khánh Băng knew a father. Lý knew a co-worker. Liên knew the man who saved her.”
Andrew rested both forearms on the table. “And now we’re trying to assemble all those pieces.”
Vincent looked around at the familiar faces. “Like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“Exactly.” Juan reached for his glass. “Perhaps that’s why this is taking so long. We’re not looking for one answer. We’re rebuilding a life.”
Nobody disagreed.
Outside, the city continued exactly as it always had. Inside the Mekong, the picture of Phong was becoming a little clearer—not because they had discovered a decisive clue, but because, piece by piece, they were beginning to understand the man before they could ever hope to understand his disappearance.