Chapter 262 - 186: Jiang Silu Calls ’Dad’ for the First Time, Lu Fan is Excited

Chapter 262: Chapter 186: Jiang Silu Calls ’Dad’ for the First Time, Lu Fan is Excited

The trip to the Northeast would take a little over two hours.

At first, Silu was very excited.

She was constantly snapping pictures with her phone.

As time went on, fatigue began to set in.

Eventually, she closed her eyes and started to doze off.

Lu Fan watched Silu sleep, his eyes filled with adoration.

He had to admit, Silu really looked like her mother when she slept.

She even pouted her lips.

This made Lu Fan unable to resist taking a picture of her with his phone.

But that very action woke the dozing Silu.

Seeing Lu Fan taking a candid photo of her, Silu’s face immediately flushed red. "Did I look really ugly just now? Oh no, I must have looked terrible."

"Not at all. You looked beautiful," Lu Fan said, showing her the photo on his phone.

But after seeing it, Silu still shook her head. "It’s so ugly, boohoo."

"I don’t have any pictures of you on my phone. I wanted to save a few as keepsakes, and I think this one is quite nice," Lu Fan said with a smile.

When Silu heard that, she quickly said, "In that case, I can show you all my old photos."

With that, she opened her photo album and began sharing her photos with Lu Fan one by one, from childhood to the present.

Silu looked down, scrolling through the album with her finger.

Lu Fan sat beside her, waiting for her to share.

"This is me when I was little."

Silu handed him the phone. On the screen was a little girl, five or six years old, with her hair in two pigtails. She wore a faded floral dress and stood at the entrance of a run-down residential complex, smiling so wide it showed two missing front teeth.

Lu Fan couldn’t help but smile as he looked at the photo.

His daughter was so adorable when she was little.

Silu swiped to the next picture. "This was me in the first grade. It was my first day of school, so Mom took a half-day off work to take me. She did my hair in two little pigtails."

The little girl in the photo was wearing a big backpack that was wider than she was, and her face held a mix of nervousness and excitement.

"Back then, I really wished a parent would come pick me up from school."

Silu’s voice was tinged with grievance. "All the other kids had their moms and dads come get them. Mom had to work, and sometimes my brother wanted to play at school. I didn’t want to wait for him, so I’d just go home by myself. When it rained, my brother and I would stand at the school gate waiting for it to stop, and we wouldn’t run home until it was already dark."

Guilt washed over Lu Fan as he listened.

It was all because of his absence that Silu and Sifan had lacked a parent’s company throughout their childhood.

"This one is from my third year of elementary school. I got first place in my class on the final exams."

Silu swiped to the next photo. The little girl in it was holding up an award certificate, beaming. She let out a small giggle. "I remember saying I was saving this picture for my dad, but back then, I didn’t know where you were. Eventually, I forgot all about it."

She pushed the phone a little closer to Lu Fan. "So I’m showing you now."

Lu Fan looked at the picture, his heart aching.

The Silu in the picture was small and thin, but her eyes were bright, and her smile was full of joy.

He thought back, trying to remember what he had been doing back then.

He had been busy with his business, busy with social obligations, busy entertaining all sorts of women. He’d never once imagined that thousands of miles away, a little girl was holding up an award certificate, waiting to show it to him.

"This one’s from junior high," Silu said, swiping to another photo. It showed a young girl with a ponytail standing by the school gate, with Jiang Sifan next to her.

"It’s me with my brother. Mom said she wanted to take a picture for us to look back on when we were older."

Lu Fan looked at the photo. Sifan was standing ramrod straight, his face set with the stubbornness unique to teenage boys.

Silu was leaning against him, grinning ear to ear without a care in the world.

The two of them stood together like a pair of small, interdependent saplings.

"Back then, some kids in my class called me the girl with no dad." Silu’s tone was flat as she spoke, but her sadness was visible. "My brother got into a fight over it. He came home with his face all bruised up, and when Mom asked what happened, he said he fell. After I found out the truth, I told him not to fight anymore. I said to just let them talk. It’s not like their words could actually hurt me."

"This was the day before my college entrance exams." Silu swiped to the last photo. In it, she was sitting at a desk piled high with books, looking back over her shoulder to smile at the camera. "Mom took this for me, said she wanted to commemorate the moment. I was so nervous that night I couldn’t sleep, so she stayed up with me until midnight, telling me not to be scared and that it didn’t matter how I did on the test."

Lu Fan took the phone and zoomed in on the photo, looking at his daughter’s smiling face.

The day before her college entrance exams, she had been nervous and scared, and he, her father, hadn’t known a thing. He hadn’t done a thing.

He suddenly realized that what he owed her wasn’t just nineteen years of his presence, but countless moments just like these.

Her first steps, her first time calling for her mom, her first day with a backpack, the first time she received an award, the first time she was mocked, the first time she picked up a paintbrush, the first time she was too nervous to sleep...

"These photos..." Lu Fan began, then asked, "Can you send them to me?"

Silu froze for a moment, looking at him.

"Your childhood pictures, your school pictures, the pictures of you drawing..."

Lu Fan handed the phone back to her and explained, "I’ve never seen any of these."

Silu didn’t know what to say.

Lu Fan looked at her, forcing a smile. "So it’s good that you’re showing them to me today. It lets me see what my daughter used to be like."

Silu lowered her head and continued to scroll through the album.

"This is from when my mom and I went to the park. She insisted I climb the rockery, but once I got to the top, I was too scared to come down and burst into tears."