Rain hammered down through the night onto a country road black as ink. Mai’s black luxury car—a thirty-three-year-old billionaire just back from signing a scholarship fund—suddenly lurched to a halt in the middle of the fields. The dashboard flared red: engine overheated. Sheets of water slapped the undercarriage; wind bowed the eucalyptus stands. With no cell signal, Mai zipped up her jacket, hugged her handbag, and felt her way along the muddy verge toward the only flicker of light: a small corrugated-tin house where a wisp of kitchen smoke curled up like silk.

The door cracked open. A thin, stooped old man in weather-faded clothes looked Mai up and down, his eyes wary yet kind.
“It’s late. Come in and get out of the wind. The house is poor and there isn’t much here, but on a rainy night people ought to shelter one another.”

Mai was about to say, “That’s not necessary,” but the warm scent of ginger tea, together with the dense patter of rain on the tin roof, stilled her words. She nodded.

The moment she stepped over the threshold, Mai froze. On the four patchily whitewashed walls hung dozens of drawings in charcoal and pigment, their frames rough wooden slats knocked together in a hurry. Every one showed the same face—large dark eyes, a small crescent-moon birthmark behind the left ear, a stubborn lock of bangs brushing the forehead. The face grew older from frame to frame: a seven-year-old clutching a doll, a sixteen-year-old with hair tied high, then a woman of twenty, twenty-five, thirty… All of them looked uncannily like Mai.

“My God!” Mai gasped, hands shaking. “Who—who painted me? Why are these all over your house?”

The old man started too, hurriedly setting the teapot down. For a heartbeat, his lined face showed the old fear of being caught doing something wrong. He stammered,
“No… I wasn’t painting you. They’re… they’re of my daughter.”

Silence fell. The rain thudded like knuckles on a door. He pulled up a bamboo chair for Mai, poured a steaming cup of ginger tea, his callused hands trembling.
“Her name is Hoa. She went missing at the district market twenty years ago, when she was seven. There was a fire that day. I managed to carry her mother out first, then ran back in. People were packed tight as ants. When the flames died, I couldn’t find my child.”

His voice cracked like a jar split down the side.
“I walked from bus depots to wards, from the mountains down to the sea. When I ran out of money I hauled sacks and mixed cement. At night I drew my daughter so I wouldn’t forget her face. I was afraid I’d forget her eyes one day, forget the little birthmark behind her ear. Each year I added another portrait, imagining how she might look as she grew… so that if I met her, I’d know her.”

Mai looked at the portrait of a sixteen-year-old hanging beside the window. In the corner, a thin line of handwriting read: “Hoa—if you are still somewhere out there, your father is waiting.”

A surge of memory rose in her—a broken lullaby, a silver coin split in two, the smell of cooking smoke tangled with banana leaves. For years she had never dared open the small box she carried everywhere out of a habit she could never quite name.

“Sir…” She took a breath, her voice rough. “Do you still have… anything that belonged to your daughter?”

He nodded and shuffled to a wooden chest in the corner. From it he took half of an old coin, its jagged teeth like a broken crescent, a little leaf engraved in the center.
“I snapped this in two on her seventh birthday. I kept this half. The other—I strung on a cord and hung around her neck. I told her, ‘This is the bàng leaf of our home. No matter where you go, if the two pieces fit, you’ve found your way back.’ And yet…” He swallowed.

Mai went still. She reached into her bag for a slim wallet. Inside the lining was a secret pocket no one else had ever touched. There, on a thin tarnished chain, hung the other half of the coin. The engraved leaf—of the bàng tree (sea almond)—was still clear.

When the two pieces met, they clicked together with a soft “tack,” like a door unlatching. The rain kept falling, but the room seemed to hold its breath. The old man stared, eyes wide, blinking again and again; Mai stared, hands shaking as she cradled the metal.

“Dad…” The word left her lips before she could think. Suddenly she was small again, running through storm and years and distance, back to the tin-roof house and the warmest, roughest hands in the world.
The old man couldn’t speak. He dropped to his knees and pulled his daughter into his arms. Both of them cried like rain bursting from a roofline.

That night they sat by a brazier, telling each other their lost years. Mai—whose childhood name was Hoa—told how a traveling couple had carried her away from the chaos of the burning market. They took her to a distant province and later left her at a shelter. She grew up, took a new name, studied as if she were walking a tightrope, always short of time and money, clinging to what she called “the discipline of hope.” She worked odd jobs, then started a business, suffered ruinous failures and hard resets, and in the end built a large logistics company and invested in technology. At thirty, she had the means to change many lives. But at night she still heard a half-sung lullaby and felt a callused hand smoothing her hair. She never understood her fear of fire, or why the smell of a burning bàng leaf could make her cry.

The old man spoke of two decades on the road. He cut stone, hauled bricks, sold lottery tickets—wandered from pier to bus station. He learned to paint shop signs to keep from starving; from the first board he painted, he began painting his daughter. He chased every rumor, rose on every hope, fell with every disappointment. People told him, “Forget it and live.” He shook his head: “If I forget my child’s face, who am I?” So he painted. He hung the portraits on every wall. Each picture was a year of his life.

“I failed you, because I didn’t hold you tighter that day,” he said, eyes blood-shot. “If you’re angry, scold me.”

“I’m not angry,” Mai said. “I only regret… the twenty years without hearing you cough, without hearing you call, ‘Hoa ơi.’”

They laughed and cried. Mai reheated the water and peeled sweet potatoes, fumbling like a child in a kitchen that somehow felt familiar. The old man took the knife from her, hands trembling but deft.
“Let me. Tonight I’ll make you fresh rice porridge. When you were little you loved perch porridge from the rice fields.”

“I remember its smell…” Mai smiled, startled at how memory sprouted like a seed in rain.

Outside, the rain thinned to a mist. Inside, the aroma of porridge rose, braided with ginger, smoke, damp clothes, and cheap drawing paper. The spoon rang softly against the pot like an old song.

By morning the clouds parted to pale blue. A tow truck had already pulled Mai’s sedan back to town. Her assistant, frantic with worry, finally found her and stopped short at the sight: the famous billionaire hanging laundry for an old man, smiling to herself.

At noon she drove back to the city—with the old man. The first thing she did wasn’t a press conference or a fairy-tale reveal for social media. She asked a physician friend to arrange a DNA test. The result—exactly what their hearts had known the night before—matched. Quietly, she also tracked down the traveling couple from years ago to thank them, and at a corner of the old market she set a small plaque that read: “Here, someone found their way home.”

She asked her father to move into her penthouse overlooking a great park. He smiled gently.
“I can be anywhere as long as I’m not far from you. But if you’ll let me, I’d like to go back to the tin house, change the roof, fix the walls. That’s where the portraits hang. I want to open my eyes each morning and see them.”

So Mai bought the plot by the canal bank and built a small red-tiled house, keeping the portrait room intact—stronger frames, clearer glass. She hired a neighbor to help cook for him and planted a bàng tree by the gate. In the afternoons she still drove out there, sitting on the porch listening to his stories of flood season and the new concrete lane through the village. On days she couldn’t make it, she called on video. On the other end, he held the phone as if it were treasure, speaking and smiling at once, an old man’s grin that somehow looked young.

At work, Mai renamed her new charity the “Bàng Leaf” Fund—a symbol of something simple and enduring. The fund helps search for missing people and builds information and skills centers for children around markets and bus stations. Each time she slips a little pendant shaped like a bàng leaf around a child’s neck, she hears in her heart the soft “tack” of two coin halves meeting on that rainy night.

When it came time to repaint the old place, Mai asked a young artist to roll on fresh coats. She didn’t want to erase the portraits. Instead she and her father chose a new centerpiece: no longer an imagined girl or a conjectured young woman, but a portrait taken from the photograph on the day of the DNA result—an old man with silver hair embracing his daughter, a window behind them opening onto the sky after rain. In the corner he carefully lettered: “Hoa of mine—Mai of my life.”

One late afternoon, father and daughter ate sweet black-bean dessert as the wind whispered through the bàng leaves. The old man said,
“Do you remember the lullaby I never once finished singing?”

Mai laughed and began,
“Ầu ơ… The wind sways the bamboo, slow and low…”

He picked it up:
“The Trấn Vũ bell, the Thọ Xương rooster…”
“Mist drifts in a thousand veils…” Mai continued, eyes shining.
“Pestles pound in Yên Thái; West Lake is a mirror to the sky.” he finished, his voice steady, as if it had weathered every storm.

The lullaby floated down the lane. The late sun fell across the shoulders of two people who had found each other again—after twenty years and one night of rain.

Only then did Mai understand why she had screamed when she first stepped into that old house, amid kitchen smoke and storm. It hadn’t been fear. It had been the sudden certainty that a door had opened—and on the other side stood the one who had been “painting her” for twenty long years, with charcoal, with tears, and with a faith that never went out.