Chapter 2

"5,000 dollars?" The doctor echoed with a scoff. "This old man only had 200 bucks on him! He can't even afford the hospital deposit, and you're telling me you gave him 5,000 dollars?

"Whatever. Just come over as quickly as you can."

The phone went silent.

I remained rooted to the ground, trembling in shock. I hurriedly took an emergency leave from work, packed up my things, and bought the first train ticket back to my hometown village.

While on the train, I looked through all the transfer records on my phone, one by one. Hadn't I just transferred 5,000 dollars to Dad? Why did the doctor say that Dad only had 200 dollars on him?

What had gone wrong?

…

I rushed to the hospital and pushed the door to the general ward open, seeing Dad there at once. He was lying on the hospital bed, his bones protruding from his thin, frail body, so skinny that he looked like a bare, dying tree branch.

I couldn't believe that this was my dad.

He might not have been the stockiest person I knew when I left home three years ago, but he had a healthy, rosy color to his plump cheeks, and his eyes always crinkled whenever he smiled.

But now, he looked like an old man in his 70s. Yet, he was only supposed to be 53 years old!

When Dad caught sight of me, he fought to get out of bed.

"I want to get out of here! I'm not staying at the hospital! I don't have any money!"

I hurriedly stopped him. "Dad, you get 7,000 dollars every month. How could you say that you don't have any money?"

Dad glared at me with pure hatred in his eyes.

"What the hell do you mean by 7,000 dollars every month? All you give me every month is just 200 dollars! You even stole all of my pension money! Where would I ever have the money to stay at the hospital?

"And yet, you insisted that you gave me 5,000 dollars every month. You're just trying to feed your ego and play the hero by pretending how generous and filial you are to me! You're just lying to the whole world!"

Dad's tears wouldn't stop rolling down his cheeks. "Do you even know what kind of life I'd been living for the past few years just because of your stupid ego?

"I can only afford dry bread scraps and moldy cheese that I had to beg from the bakeries and go dumpster diving behind restaurants at the end of the day!

"I could only barely scrape by just by collecting junk like cardboard boxes and aluminium cans and bringing them to the recycling center so that I'd have enough money to even afford the electricity bill!"

I felt as though I'd just been struck by lightning, shaking in my knees.

"But Dad, I really transferred 5,000 dollars to you every month! And I never touched your pension…"

"And you're still lying to me like that!"

Dad got even more worked up and wasn't able to stop coughing anymore. Just then, the ward door was pushed open, and my uncle, Derek Hudson, and his wife, Emily Stuart, walked in.

"Dan! Dan, are you okay?"

Dad leaned against Uncle Derek and cried so hard that his shoulders wouldn't stop shaking. "Derek… I've lived such a terrible life…"

Uncle Derek's eyes turned red-rimmed. "I'd been asking you time and time again in the past how you were doing, and you kept telling me that you were doing fine. You said that Gav had been giving you living expenses every month, and I believed you.

"But I never thought that you'd end up living a life like this!"

Uncle Derek turned around and glared at me angrily.

"Gavin Hudson! Your dad had been telling me how good you'd been to him all this time, and he also said that he never lacked any money every time I asked him about it! He said that you loved him very much!

"But if things hadn't come to this, would your dad even have said anything about his situation at all? Don't you know how much he loves you and how strong a front he tries to keep up every time?

"The only thing he could do was to bottle everything up within himself in hopes that you would finally come to your senses! But who would have thought that you'd turn out to be such an ingrate!"

"But Uncle Derek! I've really been giving him 5,000 dollars every month! I never skipped a single month!"

I showed him the records on my phone banking app. The screen clearly showed that I had been transferring 5,000 dollars to Dad every month for the past three years.

Uncle Derek just glanced at the screen and sneered loudly.

"With how advanced technology is, records like these can always be falsified. Did you really think that you'd be able to get us just by showing us a doctored screenshot like that?"

Even Aunt Emily began berating me in a sarcastic tone. "You should have just said it straight that you didn't want to give your dad a single penny in the first place."