Li Yueran's hands trembled as she parked her black luxury sedan across the street from the dusty construction site. Eighteen years. Eighteen long, torturous years of searching. She had spent every sleepless night, every penny, and every ounce of her energy chasing a ghost—the child she had given life to but lost immediately after birth.
Her mind wandered back to the day she had been forced into marriage. Her family had obeyed tradition blindly, shackled by the demands of her late husband's clan. They hadn't considered her hatred, her disgust, the way her body had rebelled at the thought of intimacy with him. She remembered vividly the sting of his touch, the allergic reaction that flared whenever he came near. Her father, too, had tried to dictate her life, and she had hated him in equal measure. Only her child—her own flesh and blood—was exempt from this curse. Only he could touch her.
She had conceived Aiden through IVF, a painstaking, lonely process. She had endured the procedure silently, every injection and every visit to the clinic a silent act of rebellion against the man she was forced to call husband. She had never loved him, and he had never known the truth. The hospital staff had been sympathetic, careful to shield her from his presence. The child she carried, she vowed, would be hers and hers alone.
Yet fate had been cruel. The moment Aiden was born, he was snatched from her arms. Her husband, oblivious to her allergy, had left the room, leaving her to watch the nurses carry her baby away. She had screamed, raged, and fallen into despair, but it had been in vain. He was gone, abandoned, and no law or plea could bring him back.
Over the years, she had climbed to unimaginable heights. Through her own brilliance, sheer will, and a mind that calculated every risk, she had become the richest woman in the country. But wealth could not heal the hollow in her heart. Every victory, every luxurious milestone, only reminded her of the child she could not touch.
And now, here he was.
Across the construction site, under the scorching sun, a young man hoisted cement bags with effortless precision. His muscles rippled under a faded shirt, and though his hands were calloused, his movements carried a familiar grace. Li Yueran's breath caught in her throat.
She had known him before she saw him. The shape of his eyes, the slope of his nose, the faint mole near his left eyebrow—it was him. Her son. Her Aiden.
He turned his head, brushing sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and for a brief instant, their eyes met. Her heart froze. She wanted to run to him, to scoop him into her arms, to apologize for every lost year. But she remembered the report she had dug up only days ago: he had been left at the orphanage gate, adopted by a family that treated him poorly, and had grown to hate his parents.
Hate.
The word struck her like a dagger. Her child hated her. Hated the very thought of her.
She stepped back instinctively, afraid that any misstep might push him further away. The driver behind her hesitated.
"Chairwoman Li… should we leave?"
Her hands gripped the steering wheel. "No," she whispered, barely audible. "Not yet."
—
That evening, in the quiet of her penthouse, Zhao Meilin, her late friend's daughter and now her secretary, approached with a cup of steaming tea.
"You went out personally today?" Meilin asked softly.
Li Yueran's gaze was distant, fixed on the city below. "I found him," she said.
Meilin froze. For five years, she had known about Li Yueran's lost child, had seen her mother's obsession with a single photograph, a bracelet, a scrap of memory. But hearing those words still took her breath away.
"You're sure?" Meilin whispered.
Li Yueran's lips curved into a faint smile. "He's alive. And he hates his parents."
The words were soft, but they carried the weight of a storm. Meilin hesitated. "Then… what will you do?"
Li Yueran's voice was almost a whisper, but there was steel behind it. "I will become someone he trusts. Someone he cannot live without. Only then… only then will he know the truth."
—
The next day, she arranged for her company to acquire the construction site—not to dismiss him, not to reward him, but to observe. From the tinted windows of her office, she watched him move. The muscles in his arms flexed with each lift, the beads of sweat on his forehead glimmered like tiny stars, and the faint crease of his frown… oh, that crease. She had memorized it before he could even speak, back when he was nothing more than a fragile infant.
He caught a glimpse of her through the window, squinted, and then went back to work. Li Yueran's hands pressed against the glass. "My son…"
The words barely escaped her lips.
Not yet. Not now.
For now, she would be a stranger. A benefactor. A silent shadow in his life. Until the day he needed her more than he hated her existence.
And when that day came…
She would never let him go.