But she cried with remarkable restraint, no sound, just silent tears. "It's been so long since anyone has been this kind to me."
"Don't be silly. It's just a meal. It's not that serious. You're from Beijing, right? How about this," He took out his wallet and pulled five hundred-yuan bills from his pocket. "This should be enough for your fare. Go to the long-distance bus station or the train station and buy your ticket. Your family must be worried sick."
Those words broke something loose inside her. All her pent-up grief burst out at once. "I have no family They're all dead, And when they were alive, they never once tried to understand how I felt. Never!"
There weren't many people eating breakfast around them, but the ones who were all cast surprised glances toward the girl, wondering what kind of trauma had brought her to this.
Her words pierced Don's heart like a knife.
He was an orphan himself. He didn't know who his parents were, he only knew that he had been raised by a man named Wright. This man had treated him very poorly. For as long as Don could remember, Wright had beaten and scolded him regularly. He smoked, drank, gambled, and chased women, every vice imaginable. Don had never felt a trace of warmth from him.
The only real sense of family he had ever known came from the Owens next door. Uncle Owen was an educated man, and his wife was cultured and kind. They had a daughter four years older than Don, and the whole family had treated him with genuine care.
Back then, his adoptive father was often out drinking, gambling, and running around with women, sometimes not returning until past midnight. But Don was never hungry, because Aunt Owen always cooked for him. And his older sister, four years his senior, had looked out for him in the small, meaningful ways that stick in a child's memory. If there was fish at a meal, she would always put a piece in his bowl.
Because his adoptive father lived so recklessly, he died suddenly when Don was seven, and Don became an orphan in the truest sense of the word. Uncle Owen adopted him that same year.
Even then, Don had been mature enough to understand what was happening. He had repeatedly asked to change his surname to Owen, but Uncle Owen always refused. He told Don that even though his adoptive father had treated him badly, the man had still saved his life by taking him in, and Don shouldn't abandon the surname he had been given. "I'm good to you, and you know that in your heart. That's enough. We're father and son, we don't need to be bound by formalities."
From then on, Uncle Owen's family took on the burden of sending two children to school, a weight the already poor household could barely carry.
Aunt Owen argued with him about it more than once. Sister Owen always stood by her father.
When Don was eight, the relationship between husband and wife finally broke down completely.
Aunt Owen took her daughter and left, reportedly marrying a foreigner under strange circumstances before disappearing without a trace. Tragically, Don never even got the chance to say goodbye to his older sister.
He had carried guilt about that ever since. If it weren't for him, the Owen family probably wouldn't have fallen apart.
But Uncle Owen raised him as his own. Never hit him. Never scolded him. And for thirteen years, the two of them had relied on each other, father and son in everything but name.
Unfortunately, good people rarely live long lives. When Don was nineteen, the same year he first stepped into the game 'Battle Online', Uncle Owen was diagnosed with lung cancer during a routine physical. It was already in the late stages. After Don learned online that there was no real cure, he threw himself into 'Battle Online' with desperate intensity, farming equipment day and night to earn money, pouring every cent of it into treatment. But even that hadn't been enough to save him.
What still haunted Don was that Uncle Owen hadn't died from the cancer. He had taken his own life. In his own words, he had to die so that Don wouldn't keep pouring his hard-earned money into a bottomless pit.
He passed away in the hospital from an overdose of sleeping pills. The death itself was peaceful, without much pain, but it had torn Don apart.
He remembered screaming, "Dad! Dad, wake up!" pushing past nurses and doctors, shaking the old man's body desperately, as if sheer force of will could bring warmth back to a cold, stiff corpse.
Uncle Owen had been a righteous man to the very end. In his will, he had already transferred the two-bedroom apartment that the government had granted him after his old house was demolished into Don's name.
He had also left behind a hundred thousand dollars in savings, all under Don's name. There was a letter too, saying that the apartment should never be sold under any circumstances, it was meant to be Don's home when he got married one day. The money was for the wedding banquet.
After handling the funeral arrangements, Don had cried alone in his room for two days and one night.
Then, dragging his dazed body back to the computer, he had finished the final battle of 'Battle Online'.
Afterward, he bought the best burial plot in Xiyuan Cemetery in Liverpool for Uncle Owen and had words engraved on the tombstone, 'The Tomb of My Biological Father, Steve Owen.
More than three years had passed since then. Whenever he remembered, it was always both warmth and a sharp pain at the same time. The truth was, he wasn't a good son. Not really. He hadn't even been able to save his own father.
Thinking about it now, he sighed, he was starting to feel sad himself...
He let out another long sigh...