794 I failed
"You should have nothing to do with that brat! And yet you met with him? Why would you do something like this?"
Yating was taken aback by his extreme reaction. "No matter what you say Dad, Dong was my good friend in high school. I never got to talk to him after everything that had happened."
"Yes and you should have never spoken to that liar brat either!"
"Liar?" His gaze darkened. "What are you even saying?"
"What else should I say when he tricked you by falling from the third floor?"
Yating's mouth fell open with sheer disbelief. "How could you say something like that! He would have died for God's sake. Do you think he would be that stupid to put his own life at risk?"
"You were so naive back then and still are!" He lashed out. "You are so blind to see how he fooled you!"
Butler Mo tried to diffuse the situation, but Gu Rong didn't allow that to happen.
"Why are you trying to calm me down? Say something to him!"
Yating angrily gritted his teeth. "It's like you are my enemy more than my father. You have a problem with everything that I do in my life! Whether it was Dong or Ai or my career choice, you stood against every single thing that I held important to me! You never respected what I cherished."
"You expect me to cherish your wrong decisions?" He shot back.
Yating's expression twisted with hurt and fury.
"That shameless Ma Dong and his family took hefty compensation from us because they blamed you for his fall!" He angrily laughed. "They were more worried about getting the compensation money rather than their son who lay at the hospital with a broken body. What was that if not for a well executed plan! He became your close friend and feigned all that friendship just so that he could pull this move in the future! He saw you for the Gu family's money, not you!"
"That's not true! Does it even make sense? He was rewarded with a scholarship! Why would he need money for his education?"
He sneered. "Because that scholarship was taken away from him."
He froze.
"It was found that he had cheated for his scholarship exam and so his scholarship was withdrawn. This had happened just two weeks before the 'supposed accident.' Just use your brain for once and think about it. Was that a coincidence that he fell that night and he conveniently got the money through me as compensation which they then used for his abroad studies? I didn't tell you at that time because you were young and stupid and emotional. Your guilt wouldn't have let you believe me but now you are old enough!"
Yating was staring at him, listening to his words that he couldn't make sense of. Dong had never told him about the withdrawn scholarship. Even on that very day when he had fallen, Dong looked completely happy and normal.
"...There is no way he wouldn't tell me about this," he said but his heart pounded fast.
Gu Rong scoffed. "What was he supposed to say to you? That he cheated? That he was actually planning to rob you on the pretext of that fall? That he was going to play this dirty game? Open your eyes now Yating! I don't know what you talked to him about when you met, but you better not meet him again!"
Yating stomped his feet in his rage and got up. His icy gaze was unforgiving. "Why don't you just admit that you don't like him? Just like you never liked Ai or anything that I did! You similarly interfered when Ai used to work in Dream High. Now that I met Dong after a long time, you are once again trying to intervene!"
"Intervene? It's not interfering, it's bringing some sense into your brain! How do you always hang around undeserving people like these? You are my son! As your father, it's my duty to show you the right way if you are too blind to see it!"
Undeserving people…
The cruel words pierced his heart like a lethal arrow.
He let out a dry, sorrowful laugh. "Show me the right way…It would have been nice if we still had Mom with us to show you the right way too."
Gu Rong froze. He stared at Yating, whose gaze reflected pain and hurt.
"Thanks for the dinner but I am not hungry anymore, Uncle," he said apologetically to Butler Mo.
"Y-Young master…"
Yating turned to leave and Gu Rong exclaimed. "Wait! Where are you going? Come back! It's disrespectful to leave in the middle of dinner like that!" He glared at him.
Yating equally shot back a deadly glare. "You have been more than disrespectful to me and my choices, Dad. Perhaps to my entire existence. Leaving dinner hardly counts. You don't gain respect by disrespecting others."
He walked away with larger strides never looking back again.
"Yating! Yating! Don't you leave! Come back! Yating!!!"
Gu Rong continued to breathlessly call him back but to no avail. His body trembled and he pressed his lower lip inward.
"Master Gu!"
Butler Mo helped him sit comfortably on the chair. He tried to calm down his haywire breaths as he offered him water. Gu Rong didn't take it.
"He left…Did you see him? He left just like that."
He stared at the empty chair opposite him, his body continuing to tremble. "For the first time in twenty-nine years, he uttered that word."
Butler Mo was helpless. He didn't know what to say to comfort him.
Gu Rong clenched the chopsticks in his hands, his nerves bulging on the back of his hand. "So I failed, right?"
His eyes widened. "Master Gu, that's ridiculous! How does it mean that you failed?"
"He never felt the need to mention his mother in all these years but now he did…Now he wished she would have been there with us today. So I lacked somewhere. I failed if I made him feel that way. I have failed as his father."
The source of this c𝐨ntent is freewe(b)nov𝒆l