We're not in the car business.We're in the memory business.— the car just happens to be included.

They had booked Minh for a single day. By 9am on day one they'd scrapped it — Mads had woken up with a fever, Freja wouldn't eat, and Sofie was forty minutes from crying in a hotel lobby in a country she couldn't read.

Minh rebuilt the day in the hotel driveway. He called his mother — a pharmacist in Cẩm Kim — and drove them to her pharmacy for children's paracetamol and a glass bottle of coconut water with salt, the Vietnamese remedy. They spent the morning on a woven mat under a longan tree. That afternoon, Freja's fever broke.

They rebooked Minh for two more days, cancelled Ha Long Bay, and spent the week between Cẩm Kim and An Bang. On the last day at DAD, Sofie hugged Minh and couldn't say anything for twenty seconds.

Day one of the honeymoon was supposed to be My Son ruins, An Bang Beach, a cooking class. Day one was a typhoon.

Most drivers would have called at 7am to cancel. Hùng called at 7am to suggest plan B. He picked them up at 9 and drove them to his own parents' village inland — a concrete house with a tin roof that sounded like applause in the rain. His mother taught Nora bánh xèo. His father, a retired fisherman, showed James how to mend a net.

They ate lunch with seven members of Hùng's extended family, most of whom had come over specifically because "the American honeymooners are here." James still has a photo on his phone of Hùng's father laughing with his head thrown back.

Ethan was sixteen, barely speaking to his father. Mike had read the driver bios three times before picking Tuấn. The line that got him: "Vegan in the land of pork." Ethan had gone vegan six months ago. Mike thought his son would never find someone who got it.

Tuấn got it immediately. On day one he asked Ethan what he was reading. It was a book on climate change. Tuấn laughed — he'd read the same one, had strong opinions. They talked for forty minutes while Mike sat in the back, listening to his son speak more than he had in six months.

Day two, Tuấn took them deep into the mountains to a coffee farm run by a man he'd gone to university with. Ethan learned to roast green beans over a wood fire. Ethan starts at Brown in the fall — environmental science.