The small bakery went completely silent.
Soft murmurs swept through the crowd like a sudden wave.
“Wait… did that girl just call him Grandpa?”
Richard Hale stood frozen in place, unable to move.
The little girl looked exhausted, her eyelids heavy with fatigue, while the older boy instinctively stepped in front of her, guarding her from everyone around them.
Richard stared at them carefully.
“You know me?” he asked quietly.
The boy hesitated for a moment before speaking.
“My mom said rich people only care about themselves.”
The sentence hit Richard harder than any insult ever could.
Slowly, he bent down to meet the boy’s eyes.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
The child’s expression immediately became cautious.
“Anna.”
Richard’s breath caught in his throat.
Anna Hale.
His daughter.
The daughter the world believed had died decades ago.
Twenty years earlier, Anna disappeared after falling in love with a poor street musician Richard refused to accept. The scandal nearly destroyed the Hale family name. Newspapers dragged their reputation through the mud for months.
Then one day…
Anna vanished without a trace.
And Richard never truly tried to find her.
To him, saving the family empire had mattered more than saving his own child.
But now…
standing only inches away from him…
was her son.
And perhaps her daughter too.
Richard’s voice shook for the first time in years.
“Where is your mother?”
The boy looked down at the floor.
“She’s dying.”
The air inside the bakery suddenly felt unbearably heavy.
Richard swallowed nervously.
“What happened to her?”
Without answering immediately, the boy reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a folded hospital document worn from being handled too many times.
Richard opened it slowly with trembling fingers.
Stage IV cancer.
Balance overdue: $387,000.
Treatment terminated.
Richard stared at the paper in complete shock.
He owned private jets.
Luxury estates.
Entire companies.
And meanwhile, his daughter had been fighting for her life alone, with no money and no help.
Suddenly, the little girl started coughing violently against the boy’s chest.
A thin line of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth.
Richard’s face turned pale instantly.
The boy panicked.
“She started coughing blood this morning…”
At that moment, something inside Richard Hale finally collapsed.
Tears filled his eyes as he grabbed his phone with shaking hands.
“Get my jet ready immediately! Contact the best specialists in the world—right now!”
Everyone inside the bakery watched in complete disbelief.
But the boy took another step back.
“No.”
Richard slowly lowered the phone.
“You can’t suddenly act like you care,” the boy said through tears. “You already left her once.”
Richard looked completely destroyed.
Then suddenly—
his phone began ringing.
Unknown number.
His trembling hand pressed the answer button.
A weak woman’s voice barely whispered through the speaker:
“Dad… if my children found you… then I may not have much time left…”
