Part 2: Frozen in shock. What did she just reveal? 🤫
“Did she just call him Grandpa?”
Richard Hale stood frozen like the world had stopped turning.
The little girl blinked slowly, exhausted and confused, while the boy tightened his grip on her protectively.
“You know him?” Richard asked quietly.
The boy hesitated.
“My mom told me never to trust rich people.”
The words hit harder than expected.
Richard crouched slightly to their level.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“Anna.”
Richard’s breathing stopped.
Anna Hale.
His missing daughter.
The daughter he told the world was dead.
Twenty years earlier, Anna vanished after falling in love with a poor musician Richard hated. The scandal nearly destroyed his reputation. Newspapers dragged the Hale family for months.
Then suddenly—
Anna disappeared.
And Richard made sure nobody searched too hard.
Because protecting the family empire mattered more than protecting her.
But now…
standing in front of him…
was her son.
And possibly her daughter.
Richard’s voice cracked for the first time in years.
“Where is your mother?”
The boy looked down.
“She’s sick.”
A horrible silence filled the bakery.
“How sick?” Richard whispered.
The boy slowly pulled a crumpled hospital paper from his hoodie pocket.
Richard unfolded it with shaking hands.
Stage 4 cancer.
Due unpaid: $387,000.
Treatment cancelled.
Richard stared at the paper in horror.
All his money.
All his power.
And his daughter had been dying alone in poverty.
Suddenly the little girl coughed violently into the boy’s shoulder.
A small drop of blood stained her lips.
Richard’s heart nearly stopped.
The boy looked terrified.
“She’s been coughing blood since this morning…”
For the first time in decades, billionaire Richard Hale completely broke.
Tears filled his eyes as he grabbed his phone.
“Prepare the jet. Call the best doctors in the world. NOW!”
The bakery watched in stunned silence.
But the boy stepped backward.
“No.”
Richard froze.
“You don’t get to help now,” the boy said, tears streaming down his face. “You abandoned her already.”
Richard looked shattered.
And at that exact moment—
his phone rang.
Unknown caller.
He answered slowly.
A weak female voice whispered through the speaker:
May you like
“Dad… if you found my children… it means I’m probably already dying…”
