My Alleged Husband

I know some of the things I said hurt you, but I still believe my feelings for you are the most beautiful. I don’t care what other people think; as long as I feel you’re worth it, then you are worth it.

Seeing his grandfather being so angered by Zhang Zhentian, Zhang Yichen turned to Old Master Zhang and said, "Grandpa, please don’t be angry anymore. There’s no need to make such a big fuss over this and make yourself so unhappy. Your body can’t withstand this. Don’t get worked up over some unrelated people and let yourself get seriously upset for nothing. It’s not worth it. As long as our family can live happily together in the future, that’s enough. As for what they think, whether they’re willing to come back or whether they see us as their real family, none of that matters to me anymore. For me, I only hope my grandpa can stay by my side and never leave me for the rest of my life. In fact, the person I’m most grateful to in this life isn’t my mom or my dad. Even though they brought me into this world and gave me life, so I could have the chance to experience all the warmth and coldness of human relationships, all the births and deaths—still, I would rather my parents not come back. The person I’m most grateful to is you, because you’re my grandfather, and you worked so hard to raise me. It was you who gave me life as I know it and allowed me to achieve what I have today. Every step was difficult, but that process was fulfilling, and I’m satisfied with the result in the end, that I can live happily. I never imagined that everything I did could make me this happy, and it was all because you were behind me, supporting me. You gave me an endless well of support. You’re the one who made me understand that you can’t give up halfway, that anything you start you must see through to the end; that once you’ve decided to do something, you must do it steadily and thoroughly, and you must make a success of it—that’s the only way to have your own value and goals to strive for!"

When Old Master Zhang heard his grandson say these words, he was deeply moved. He felt that in this lifetime he had not come to this world in vain. To have such a considerate grandson, his own grandson, to let him taste the joy of family affection—how could he not be happy? This was the happiest thing in his entire life: to have this grandson he had raised himself, the one he had painstakingly nurtured with his own hands. Sure enough, he was different.

"Child, you’ve suffered all these years. It was because Grandpa insisted on his own way back then and drove your father and mother out of the house that you never got to experience what a mother’s love or a father’s love feels like all these years. It was Grandpa’s stubbornness back then that kept everyone from living happily. It’s Grandpa’s fault. Can you forgive Grandpa?"

"Grandpa, don’t say that. No matter who it was that made my parents leave me, it no longer matters to me. If in my parents’ hearts they truly cared about me the way you do, then no one could have driven them away. If just one time of being turned away at the door was enough to make them leave, that proves that in their hearts they had long wanted to abandon me and never planned to stay by my side to watch me grow. You can’t be blamed for that. If anyone’s to blame, it should be me, for being too useless, for being someone everyone despised, which made my parents search for every possible excuse to leave me, to make themselves feel that leaving me was the best outcome. But what they didn’t know was that precisely because they abandoned me, I became who I am today. It was also because of their abandonment that I was able to struggle step by step to where I am now. Exactly because they cast me off, I went through every hardship."

"Maybe you value everything in this world, but to your biological father, he doesn’t care about any of it. He thinks none of this matters; the only thing he cares about is your biological mother. I don’t know how to persuade him. Things kept happening again and again, time kept passing second by second, but he never thought about where his mistake lay, never reflected on what he’d done wrong, never thought there would be a reckoning one day. So what right does he have to ask us over and over again to forgive him? And every time, it’s because of him that we are left battered and bruised, our hearts already covered in scars, and now we still have to face him once more."

Zhang Yichen knew that regarding this matter, for his own grandfather, it was still hard to accept. No one could easily accept that the son they had painstakingly raised all those years would end up harboring nothing but hatred toward his own father, with not a shred of love. Whose heart wouldn’t ache over that?

"Grandpa, no matter what happens, no matter how great the hardship, I hope you can say it out loud. We’ll shoulder it with you; you don’t have to bear it all alone. If it’s not your fault, why should you admit to it? What’s been done has been done, and what hasn’t been done simply hasn’t been done. Why should we change ourselves because of someone else, because of what others have done? You can give everything for someone, but if they never feel grateful, that only proves that person is ungrateful. For the people we each care about, we’ve all given far, far too much. You gave so much for my father, and I also lost a great deal because of him. In the end he still thinks all of us owe him. He has never once thought about whether he did anything wrong. In his heart there is only my mother. Without my mother, he feels as if he’s lost the whole world. But he doesn’t understand that precisely because he acts this way, he breaks the hearts of every single person who truly cares about him!"

"If only your father could be as sensible as you. Your father is the child Grandpa worked so hard to raise. I had hoped he could take over my company, but in the end he abandoned Grandpa for your birth mother. Only now do I realize that everything is exactly the same as it was back then. He has always been so selfish, never thinking about how we, the ones who love him, were living. I once gave so much for him and even thought about giving up all my family property for his sake. But in the end I realized that no matter what I did, in your father’s eyes it was all insignificant. He could always brush it aside and just do whatever he wanted. He felt everything we did for him didn’t matter, that he could simply not care, but we can’t. My business was built from nothing, created through my own hard work. I can’t let the enterprise I built with such effort just disappear like that. That would cause me unbearable pain. In the end it was you who kept Grandpa’s dream from being shattered..."

In that faraway place, can you hear my call to you as well? If love could bring you back to my side, how happy I would be!