I used to hate the number six. It wasn’t out of superstition—it was just that since I was a child, I had a small scar next to the knuckle of my left hand, a thread as faint as a strand of hair. My mother said that when I was three years old, I had an extra finger, and after the operation, I forgot, and my hands grew up “as beautiful as new”. I forgot, until that rainy night.

The rain in Hue poured like draining the water of the Perfume River and poured directly into the corrugated iron roof of the hospital. Ly hugged her stomach, each mound was a wrinkled face, sweat dripping into streaks on her sideburns. I drove into the emergency hall, the car stopped the safe. The lifting door opened, and the two assistants huddled together to push the bandage. I ran after him, the bag stumbled on the steps and fell, and the duck diapers were splattered.

“Don’t worry, take a deep breath… I’m going in,” Ly said in a whisper, her hand squeezing my wrist for a moment, warm and trembling.

The elevator for boarding made a sound and then stood still. The assistant said: “It’s raining heavily, the electricity is flickering, it must be congested, go up the stairs quickly.” I leaned over to support Ly’s back, counting the steps, each breath was a thin knife that cut into my biceps.

Sixth floor. Obstetrics Department. The smell of iodine alcohol, the smell of damp rain, the smell of folding pillows is somewhat human. Ly was taken to the delivery waiting room, and the nurse handed me a thin blue shirt, telling me to put it on if I wanted to be next to her. I nodded. While I was stumbling on the buttons, I suddenly saw a very familiar face in the opposite row.

The person stood up, his eyes wide open, round like a lighter. “An?”

“Huang?”

The wind blew through the corridor, the rain hit the windows, and the sound of rain popped like someone knocking on the table. In the midst of the rain, the sound of a woman hissing through her teeth. I turned around—a sister in a pregnant dress, her hands on her stomach, pain that made her face purple. Huang took it. He was startled when he saw me looking at him and said slowly, “My wife… pain from the afternoon. I didn’t expect it to be on this night.”

I was dumbfounded. Unconsciously, the two men who used to stand at both ends of the same name are now standing in the same corridor, everyone’s hands shaking.

In the past, Hoang was Ly’s ex-lover. The two have been in love since university in Hue, parting ways in their final year because of family and work. When I met Ly at a new class in Da Nang, everything between us was like a strange jigsaw puzzle. I heard Hoang’s name through a story or two, a gentle frown, a sigh from a long time ago. We got married on a very blue day. I told myself that the past was a passing ferry.

However, tonight, the old ferry wharf is anchored on the same shore.

Ly was put into delivery room No. 5. Hoang’s wife—Trang—enters room 7. Loudspeakers timidly announced the indicators, and the sound of babies crying from the neonatal room echoed from time to time like a tap on the chest. I stood by the glass door of the waiting room, looking up at the ceiling where the sixth-floor light bulb flickered softly. The rain stopped for a moment, and then rushed in again.

“An.” Hoang stood next to him. He stretched out his hand as if he wanted to touch my shoulder and then retreated again. “What a coincidence.”

I laughed wryly. “Yes.”

We sat down at either end of the bench, and in the middle was a wall light bulb that had just gone out. Each of them held a cup of hot tea that the nurse brought, and the smell of lotus tea was faint. We, two seemingly complete strangers, share the characteristic silence of fathers waiting outside the delivery room: half fearful, half hopeful, the other with sweaty palms.

Suddenly, the lights went out. The corridor was engulfed in thick darkness, and only the red light of the emergency lights flickered. A nurse rushed over, shouting: “The generator is coming up again. If you have relatives in the delivery room, just calm down, don’t crowd.” I heard my heart pounding like a goat drum. A few seconds later, the generator exploded, the yellow light flashed again, and the ceiling shook into a wave.

Then a cry came from room 5. Sharp, strong, full of life. I was pushed out of my chair by myself, rushing closer. A nurse opened the door and asked, “Brother An, right? Congratulations, the boy is very good!”

I found myself laughing out loud, my lips wet with tears from time to time. Everything shook as if it had just passed through a storm—and then it was still. Five minutes later, another cry came from room 7. Huang stood up, his eyes were also wet, and his bow had something very familiar.

In the neonatal room, after a lengthy hand disinfection procedure, I was able to see my baby through the glass. The little boy was lying in a tiny incubator, his skin was as red as freshly boiled shrimp, his eyes were closed, his fists were half-closed. I was looking at it when I was startled: her left hand, in addition to four fingers and a thumb, had a small finger like an extra petal, pink and white.

I was stunned. The part of my memory that was always locked up suddenly seemed to have someone’s fingernails: my thin scars, the sentence “when I was three years old, I had one finger left…”.

“This…” I stammered, called the nurse. She laughed: “She has extra fingers. It is not uncommon, there are three cases here every year. The surgery is simple, small and small, and it’s done, leaving no mark.”

I nodded, my heart beating wildly. I watched her a little more, her ribs rising and then lowering with her little breathing. I want to call my mother, my father, heaven and earth. I just turned away, glancing at the incubator next to me—just as the nurse was picking up another baby. And that baby’s left finger… An extra finger, exactly the same.

I felt that my throat was dry, as if I had just swallowed a limestone.

The name on the incubator tag: “Girl—Trang/Hoang”.

A dark feeling like the shadow of a ceiling fan turned upside down swept through my eyes. I stood dead. The coincidence is not pleasant. “It’s not uncommon”—but two babies lying next to each other, born a few minutes apart, both my child and my wife’s ex… share such an unbelievable characteristic.

A dark question that seems to be carved into the back of the neck: Is this a coincidence—or is it the unwritten confession of fate?

I hid Ly about the baby’s extra finger next to me. Ly was tired, her lips were dry and cracked, her eyes were wet and peaceful. “I’m just like you,” she smiled tiredly, “her eyes were a little slanted.” I could only nod.

Hoang looked for me on the balcony smoking, the sky had stopped, the smell of wet leaves and rainwater accumulated in droplets on the edge of the railing. He handed me the lighter box and said nothing. The two men stood silent. The smoke dissolves into thin fibers, which blend into the water vapor.

“My baby… also have extra fingers on his left hand,” Hoang said. His voice was hoarse.

I turned and looked at him slowly. In his eyes, there was nothing but pure fatigue and anxiety like every new father. He continued: “The nurse said it could be cut. No problem. But I… I used to have such an extra finger. When I was a child, I cut it. Until now, there are still scars. What about you?”

I looked at my palm, where the scar was as thin as thread. I nodded. Why didn’t anyone tell me enough about this? Or did I never ask carefully? Or did I deliberately forget?

“Then…” Hoang abandoned the badger. The other half of the sentence hung between the two of them, like a naked bridge across an abyss, waiting for someone to step.

At that moment, my father arrived. He stood in the hallway, his glasses down the bridge of his nose. He touched my head, gave me a very short congratulations—the kind of an old-fashioned man—and cleared his throat: “Little boy… how are you?”

I nodded. Huang stood apart, nodded politely. Dad looked at him, frowned as if trying to search through his memories, and then let go. I took my father to the neonatal room. He looked at him, his face sagging for a very small second when he saw his left hand. He was silent for a long time, then clutched his mask and said in a hoarse voice: “This… it’s okay. Operate early.”

I saw his eyes shine something like rain flying through a street lamp, fast and evasive.

“Dad,” I asked, “did you have…?”

He was startled, then smiled wryly: “When I was a child, my father also had extra fingers. Cut. My family is genetic. But it’s the end of the operation, don’t worry.”

Oh my God, why is such a big story only told with a few words “dissect the thing and it’s over”? I swallowed all the questions and ran around like ants, promising to talk about it later.

That night, when I brought the porridge back to Ly, passing by room 7, I heard Trang crying, and Hoang coaxed. There’s something cracking somewhere. We all went to the same room, each hugging a bottle of milk, a new loneliness.

On the day of discharge from the hospital, a small commotion occurred. During the procedure, the electricity flickered, the printer jammed the paper, and the nurse ran confused like a stalk. An intern nurse, a baby with young eyes, carried the two babies in two strollers to prepare to take them to the gate. At that time, an old woman selling fruit on the sidewalk hiding from the rain ran into the wrong area, causing the security guard to chase and hit the stroller. The two cars shook vigorously. Children cry silently.

I was able to hug my child. Hoang is the same. Everything happens in the blink of an eye. When she was quiet, the adult midwife rushed to check each baby’s arm tie. My baby’s ring is light blue, written “Ly/An — Nam”. The Hoang family’s baby ring is pink, written “Trang/Hoang — Female”. Everything is in place. The chief midwife exhaled: “I’m sorry you two. Today it was raining, the electricity was malfunctioning, and we were confused. Thank you two for calming down.”

I laughed. In that moment, for some reason, I looked at their left hand. And it was that same thing—that meaningless but meaningful extra finger—reassured me in a strange way: even when things were messed up, we knew where our children were. A tiny belief, like a knot in a thread.

Thinking that everything was done, Ly and I carried the baby back. The first night at home, Ly fell asleep as if sinking into a cool well, and I sat and watched her breathe, my heart trembling. But in the middle of the night, a message hit my phone screen like a pebble in the glass:

“An, I… I want to do a DNA test. It’s not that I suspect Trang. I… just want to know something else. Do you agree to work together?”

I read it again three times. Huang said “another thing”—what is it? The coincidence of two extra fingers? Old scars on our hands? The hurried glances on his father’s face?

I sat on the edge of the bed, put my phone down, and picked it up again. The yellow nightlight spilled on my hand. I thought of Ly. Think of the rainy night at the hospital. Think of a long distance, like a road that if you don’t walk, you don’t know where it leads for the rest of your life.

The next morning, I told Ly. She looked at me, tired but strangely clear after giving birth: “You do it. I don’t hide anything from you. But I think… I’m asking about someone else, not me.”

One sweltering afternoon, Hoang and I met in a private laboratory. We added the blood samples of the two children—with the wife’s consent—to our samples. The technician drew blood so quickly and neatly that she couldn’t be afraid. “Results in five days,” she said.

Those five days were as long as the five rainy seasons. I did all sorts of miscellaneous things to keep busy: washing diapers, warming milk, changing diapers, learning how to hold my baby without breaking my neck. Ly looked at me embarrassed, laughing. At one point, I caught my father standing at the door, looking in, his eyes far away. I invited my father in, he sat next to the cradle, his hand resting on the side of the cradle very lightly. He was going to say something, and that’s it.

On the fifth day, I went to get the results. The waiting room is as cold as a glass cabinet. The paper turned, I opened it.

The text is in bold at the beginning: “Father-son blood relationship between An and Be (Ly/An): AFFIRMATIVE.” I exhaled, feeling like someone had put a warm blanket over my heart. The second line: “Father-son blood relationship between Hoang and Be (Trang/Hoang): AFFIRMATIVE.” I nodded. At this point, everything may end like a recent storm.

But the third line, smaller text, is like a hanger waiting for a heart hook: “Genetic correlation index between An and Hoang: High, suggesting a half-brother relationship (reliability > 99%). Further testing is recommended in the previous generation.”

I sat still, listening to the sound of the air conditioner screeching and the sound of paper rubbing against each other. What just happened to me? The invisible ropes suddenly appeared, tense, and made a muffled sound. I took the paper and went out, it was bright outside, and the leaves had just washed the rain as green as glass.

Hoang stood and waited under the tree. I handed over the paper. He read, his eyes widened, and then closed, looking up at the sky as if he wanted to swallow too much light. No one said a word for a long time.

Then Huang laughed slightly, a breathless laugh: “It turns out… We are brothers.”

I felt my tears burning. Not because of sadness or joy, but because of something like letting go of a burden, and taking on a new burden right away.

In the evening, I brought the paper back and put it in front of my father. Ly was in the room holding the child, I closed the door. Dad looked at him, and his hands trembled very slightly. After a long time, he took off his glasses, wiped them over and over again with a corner of his shirt, and then laid them down on the table. He spoke slowly, as if collecting every word:

“Dad… knowing that this day will come, but not knowing how it will come.”

He was silent. I’m also silent. Time slacks like a string being pressed. Dad said.

When he was young, before marrying his mother, his father worked as a supply worker for a medical station in Quang Tri. The news was intense at home, and he had to go in and out of the river and the wharf. There was a girl—a Hue native—who went to the area to be a teacher. The two met at Tram Me wharf. A long rainy season, the two became friends but did not have time to get married. Then my father went to the South as dispatched. When she returned, she had switched schools. Dad only kept a photo of her in front of the closet door for a while, then put it in the bottom of the chest. Mom came, married Dad. My father’s life passed. Dad didn’t know that he left a son in Hue.

“Have you ever tried to find it?” I asked. My voice was a little harsh, and then lowered. I saw my mother’s shadow, my grandmother’s sweat drops when selling street vendors, and my father’s calloused hands when pulling a rental car. I was angry and sad. I love and get angry.

Dad shook his head. “That day… poor and stupid. I’m afraid of disturbing people. Afraid of making my mother and daughter suffer. Afraid of everything.”

We sat until the front porch light turned on several times and then turned it off. The anger in me melted like a stone in a glass of water. The other is a cold water surface but the bottom is visible: the third is a person, not a rock. People are scared. If you are afraid, you hide it. To hide is to regret.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

Dad touched his lips and exhaled like someone who had just climbed a slope: “It’s Mrs. Lan. is already Hoang’s mother.”

Every sentence falls into its place as the last piece of the puzzle clicks. I looked at the test paper: “half-brother”. Normally, those four words could be a knife. But now, it was like a boat: stagnant, but it could carry people.

The next day, I met Hoang at the water bar in front of the hospital gate. The sky had stopped for a long time, and the sun was shining on the table like honey. We sat down, each with a glass of sugarcane juice, a curved straw.

“I told my mother. My mother said that there was a man in Quang Tri the other day. The same name,” Hoang said. “Mom cried, but she didn’t blame anyone. I said that if I met, I would like to take a look at him for a while.”

I nodded. I told my father what he said. There are sentences that have no place yesterday, and today they sound like they are waiting.

Hoang suddenly burst out laughing, just like when a freshman laughed because he bought the wrong book: “Hey, so our two children… are cousins. And there’s my grandfather’s ‘keepsake’—the extra finger.”

I also laughed, laughed until I shed tears. I thought of the rainy night, of my stiff arms when I hugged my baby for the first time. Everything is now suddenly as soft as a cloth to dry in the sun.

“Ah, what about this,” Huang scratched his head, “On the day I was discharged from the hospital, I noticed a bunch of newborn arms. It’s easy to get confused. If it weren’t for that finger, maybe… I should have carried the wrong child.”

I was startled. Hoang’s words were like a pebble falling to the bottom of the water, making circles echo. That night, I went back to the hospital and gave a small gift bag to thank you. The chief midwife accepted and looked at me intently. She whispered as if telling a secret: “There was a mistake that day. The lights flickered again, the two children were lying next to each other, the name tags had just been pasted, and they had not had time to check again. Fortunately, the intern girl saw each child’s ‘extra finger’ and… laugh. She said, ‘Boys with six fingers are from room 5, girls with six fingers are also from room 7. It’s very easy to remember.’ We looked at each other… to be startled. At that time, if you make a little mistake… well, it’s over.”

I stood in front of the door of the Obstetrics Department, the sun had faded, a slow crawl past the timeline of the day. Suddenly, I was grateful for something that I had just wanted to erase all these days: my extra finger. It is like a nail, although ugly, but it keeps the door of destiny from being knocked away.

A month later, we—me and Ly, Hoang and Trang, my father and Hoang’s mother—sat around a simple dining table at my house. On the table was a bowl of chicken porridge, a plate of braised fish, and a bowl of green boiled morning glory. The children slept in the room, the two of them lay next to each other, and the hands of the little shallot were placed next to each other like two commas. Huang’s mother—Mrs. Lan—looked at my father, and it took a long time to say, “How are you?”

My father put down his chopsticks and bowed his head. He used a very old word: “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Lan laughed, but tears were in her eyes. “Oh well, I’m sorry. Youth… go like water. Each person holds a paragraph. Now we meet again, like water going down to another wharf. Their two children are very much like you.”

The whole family laughed. A bright smile mixed with a bit of luck. Ly looked at me, secretly touching my knee under the table—a touch that said, “It’s over, listen?” I grabbed it.

The afternoon passed in broken stories. Hoang talked about opening a camera repair shop, I told about the project at the company. Dad told the story of the old health station, Ms. Lan told the story of the Tram Me ferry. Ly and Trang exchanged milking secrets, how to squeeze betel leaf for the navel. Each story is a connection, tied together pieces of life that never seem to meet.

It’s time to name the two of them. I wrote down a few names on a piece of paper: “Ha”, “Minh”, “Binh”. Hoang pulled out another sheet from his pocket, old, with three identical names also written on it. We were dumbfounded, and then laughed together like kids caught stalking popcorn on the stove.

“Well,” my father said, “you two choose Binh. Peace after the storm.”

So my son’s name is Binh. Hoang’s baby girl is also named Binh, called at home as Binh. The two names are the same, written together as “Binh Binh”—sounding like the sound of calm water behind the shore.

The date of the surgery to remove the extra finger for the two children. The hospital was as bright as a well-cleaned glass. I held my child, Hoang held my niece. Before entering the small operating room, the nurse pressed my hand with white tape and wrote my name. I suddenly looked at her hand, and saw that her finger was tiny like a sprout, so sad that she wanted to put it in her mouth to make it soft like a grain of rice.

“Do you regret it?” Ly asked softly.

I shook my head. “Nope. I keep photos, keep memories. And the finger… Let it be a story.”

The operation was as quick as the nurse’s promise. The two children were fast asleep, their faces peaceful. When I returned, I carried Binh through the corridor window, suddenly remembering the rainy night and the red light of the emergency light. I put my hand on my chest, felt my heart beat, and heard another sound: the sound of a rope that had just been connected, vibrating softly between the roofs.

Huang stood next to me, and naturally asked, “Hey An, do you still hate the number six?”

I thought for a second and then laughed. “Nope. Six is a story. And the story has an opening and ending. Today, I see it closed… to open up another.”

We watched the two children sleep in the sun. Each child’s left hand had a white cotton bandage, each cotton bandage had a beautiful purple ink that the nurse accidentally dotted on. The two ribbons are like two small sails. The wind from the corridor was cool. Somewhere, a shy medical speaker called the name of a pregnant woman for a follow-up examination. The smell of iodine alcohol passes through, then disappears into the air fragrant with the smell of cotton and milk.

Years later, when I told Binh about the day he was born, I started with another story, about the rain in Hue, about a jammed elevator, about the first cry that sounded like a corner of the sky. Then I told me about a man with a past that he hadn’t had time to call his name, standing next to another man, waiting for his child to cry on the other side of the glass window. I told him about the two extra fingers that made people suspicious, and then erased the doubt. Two extra fingers almost caused the two children to get lost, and then it kept them in the right place.

“You’ll ask,” I know for sure, “why do adults hide secrets?”

I would reply, “Because adults are afraid. But luckily, sometimes, fate has a kind of humor: it forces secrets to come to light just when the whole family is crying. Then people have to choose—either keep hiding, or sit down and talk to each other about a meal.”

I chose the meal.

And every time there were two children sitting down to eat, each child’s left hand—now healed—still had a beautiful scar like a streak of purple ink in the old days. I looked at those streaks as one would look at a small line on a map: a road that had gone through the storm, and then found the shore.

Some people say: two children born at the same time, share the same “unbelievable characteristics”, very evil, life likes to tease people. I think differently: life is a joke, but it’s not evil. It gives us a sign—ugly enough for us to remember, beautiful enough for us to be grateful for. As a result, I have one more brother, Ly has a friend, my father has the opportunity to bow his head and raise his face, and the two children have one more story to tell outside of school.

That night, when it rained again in Hue, I opened the window, heard the sound of drops falling on the corrugated iron roof, the smell of the earth rising as soft as breathing. I looked at the house opposite—Hoang’s house—the night lamp was shining yellow. I sent him a short, unmarked message:

“Haven’t slept yet, brother two”

On the other side, the lights suddenly went out. A blue dot lit up on my screen, and then the answer, as neat and warm as a cup of lotus tea in the waiting room every year:

“Then the sixth brother”