Chapter 109: Are You Looking For My Dad?
The things inside were intact. Just there was one more letter with no words or seal on the envelope.
The letter inside only wrote about a few lines, a name, a phone number, and an address. The handwriting was in a mess, added with a question mark at the end, which indicated Travis had not confirmed the information on the letter.
One thing slipped out of the envelope and rolled to the ground. She and Ryan looked for a long time to find it. It was a tourmaline bead, the one lost in Travis’s villa on the eve before she left him.
Ryan pinched the bead and wondered, “Hey?”
“What?”
“This must not be from Mr. Cooper…”
Arianna waited for him to continue.
“Mr. Cooper would not collect things of this quality. He only collects the best.”
“That’s one of my mother’s relics. This bead was lost when my bracelet was broken, and I didn’t find it that night.”
Ryan was embarrassed by her unwelcome answer, and he said with a hand rubbing on his head, “Is the name of this person, York Lee, on this letter… related to you?” Ryan was, in fact, a little disappointed after seeing that letter.
“My mother told me a long time ago that my biological father was gone long ago.”
Arianna vaguely remembered that the old nanny had said her mother gave the name “Arianna” to her against the will of Franco Sanchez, Arianna’s grandfather. It turned out Arianna’s mother, although indifferent about almost anything, had her way of commemorating the important person in her life.
Through the Internet, Arianna found out the address on that letter was a private territory in the state of Country A. The man, York Lee, was a winemaker. About his situation, he wrote only a few words online, saying that he was persistent in maintaining the old-world winemaking tradition. Other than that, Arianna could not find more information about this man.
A few days later, however, the resourceful Ryan brought her more detailed information about that man: York Lee, 55 years old, lived in country A for more than 20 years, had a wife in her 40s, and they had a daughter at 17 years old. York was the chief winemaker of a vineyard. The winery had a reputation in a small group of wine communities but was not famous to the outside world because their wine was never sold in public markets. And the important thing with York Lee was that he was from the same city and the same country Arianna grew up in and now still living in.
Among the information provided by Ryan, Arianna paid attention to two messages. The first message said York’s winery began focusing on making white wine ten years ago, which could be the reason for Travis to find him because Travis was only interested in white wine. Another message said that York was also a wine appraiser, but he used another name Elen Lee when he was doing wine appraiser jobs. Arianna knew her mom’s given name was Elena. Could he be somehow related to her mom?
Ryan even found a photo, like a sneak shot. In the photo, it was a happy family of parents and a daughter. The man looked much older than his age, probably because of the hardship he had been through in his younger age, but his younger version could be handsome, judging from the photo. The young daughter, innocently smiling, had her facial signatures resembling Arianna.This content provided by N(o)velDrama].[Org.
Arianna had heard the voice of the girl. Two days ago, after quite some time of struggling, Arianna dialed the phone number from that letter, and the daughter picked it up with a young and naive voice. Arianna asked if there was a Mr. Lee on the other side of the phone.
The girl replied, “Are you looking for my dad? He went to my friend’s birthday party with my mother.”
At that time, Arianna said that she had dialed the wrong number and hung up after apologizing. Then she gave up the idea of continuing the investigation.
Arianna expressed her gratitude to Ryan but then asked him to stop here and leave that family in peace. Arianna remembered the times when she was 17. Her whole world was a mess when she learned that she was a foster child of her family.
“Ryan, I’ve got used to being alone. I don’t need a biological father now, and he doesn’t need me either. What’s more, in the past few years, everything got lost inevitably in the end. It’s better not to get started this time.”
It turned out Travis’s final wish was to let Arianna reunite with her biological father. Travis indirectly caused her to lose her loved ones one by one, and he wanted to compensate her in such a way. However, Arianna did not need it anymore.
Ryan shrugged and said, “As you wish. He is not my father anyway.” Ryan has only pissed off again because this woman ignored Mr. Cooper’s efforts again.
All the things that happened to Arianna were so coincidental. Just three months after she tried to forget about it, she got an invitation card for the 50th-anniversary celebration of a famous winery. That thick invitation was like a product brochure. On the card, the name of the authoritative wine critic ELEN LEE was impressive.
This name could be the name of her biological father. Even though Arianna tried hard to get rid of it in her mind but when the person with this name would soon show up a few hundred kilometers away from her, her heartbeat just ramped up.
Arianna decided to join the celebration on behalf of the company and managed to get a dinner ticket. It was said that all the wine critics invited to the dinner would participate. “I’ll go check on him for my mom,” Arianna said to herself.
It’s easier to confirm York’s identity than Arianna thought. Originally, she just looked at the old man with a good white suit, and she had a strange but familiar feeling of being alone. One of the organizing staff recognized Arianna and invited her to a table only half a meter away from York.
York smiled very amiably. After a few greeting lines, York became more friendly toward Arianna and said to his friends, “Can you believe that? This lady has the same place of origin as I do!”
Arianna then discovered that York was wearing a string of beads. He would fiddle the beads once in a while when he was listening to others. Arianna soon found two tourmaline beads near the knot on York’s bracelet. The color and size of the tourmaline beads were exactly like the bracelet her mother left to her. Travis once said the beads of her mom’s bracelet came from the same stone.