Read Chapter 10: — THE PUBLIC APOLOGY

Cai's next attack did not involve poison.

Customers began reporting that expensive Huashi furniture contained concrete hidden inside supposedly solid components. Photographs spread online. Consumer regulators appeared. Reporters gathered outside the company.

The suspicious products had been produced under an outsourced contract with Guyun Furniture, a company Yonghe had recommended when Huashi's own factory reached capacity.

The implication was perfect: Mufeng had sent business to his lover's associates, received defective goods, and endangered the company's reputation.

He investigated Guyun personally and found no evidence of fraud.

Yet the fake products existed.

At two emergency meetings, older executives advised silence, legal containment, and carefully worded statements.

Mufeng chose the opposite.

He organised a public meeting with customers, regulators, journalists and consumer representatives.

"If our name is on the product," he said from the stage, "then the responsibility reaches us before it reaches anyone else."

Some customers shouted. One man, furious over the money he had lost, struck Mufeng hard enough to fracture his collarbone.

He refused to end the meeting.

Huashi offered tenfold compensation for confirmed cases and opened its supply chain to inspection.

The fraud was eventually traced to a substitution scheme outside Guyun's authorised production line, but the reputational damage remained.

Mufeng submitted his resignation.

Hua Suxian flew back from the United States before the board could accept it.

Their first face-to-face meeting took place at Yiding Garden.

Hua was in her early fifties and carried herself with quiet elegance. Her eyes unsettled him. He had seen the same shape in photographs of He Jiazhen.

"Don't punish him," she told the board. "A manager who accepts responsibility before he has all the facts is not the person I intend to lose."

Mufeng wanted to ask her about the kidney.

Instead he asked about the screen.

Bu Suyu intervened immediately.

Hua stopped him.

"It was me," she said.

The room seemed to narrow.

"I was behind the screen that day."

"Why?"

Her composure broke only slightly.

"I wanted to look at you before you knew I was looking."

"Why?"

Tears entered her eyes.

"Because sometimes a mother wants to know what a healthy young man looks like when he laughs. Even if only for a moment."

Mufeng heard only the word mother.

He did not yet understand what it meant.