"Mom, keep your voice down. Don’t wake Grandpa," Shen Yi said calmly.

Du Liya nodded vigorously. She knew that because of her own troubles, her elderly, ailing father had been suffering and getting upset for the past few days, and she felt terribly guilty.

Her father had finally managed to get to bed early for once, and she couldn’t risk waking him.

Du Liya whispered, "So who is this girl? Do I know her? Is she nice?"

"You know her. She’s very nice, but that’s not the point. The point is, she doesn’t like me."

"Huh?"

Du Liya was actually shocked that her son was interested in someone, but she wouldn’t oppose it. After all, just as he’d said, he was almost nineteen. By the time she was that age, she had already started pursuing Shen Zhengfeng.

However, her relationship with Shen Zhengfeng had, in hindsight, been a colossal mistake. So while Du Liya didn’t oppose her son dating, she hoped he would keep his eyes wide open and not end up with some little vixen.

She had been badly burned by love and didn’t want her son to suffer the same fate.

But Du Liya never would have imagined that her son’s problem was that the girl wasn’t interested in him.

Du Liya was not having it. "Who is this girl, with such high standards? My Xiao Yi is handsome, his grades are... well, they’re decent, but that’s not important. Our family is rich, so on what grounds is she not into you?!"

The more she spoke, the more indignant she became.

Shen Yi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He hadn’t brought up the topic to give his mother a bad impression of Qin Jiao. He waited for her to finish her indignant rant before saying, "Mom, I haven’t told her how I feel yet. She doesn’t even know I like her. She just sees me as a friend."

Du Liya paused.

"So, you’re saying this girl is just innocent and hasn’t even thought about dating?"

"Yes."

This time, Du Liya stopped talking about the girl and studied her son carefully. He had grown taller, his features becoming more and more handsome. Neither she nor Shen Zhengfeng were bad-looking, and their son seemed to have inherited the best traits from both of them—he was an absolutely handsome young man.

’He might be handsome, but how can he be so hopeless?’

Disappointed by his lack of initiative, Du Liya said, "Oh, Xiao Yi, you’re really something else. You’re almost nineteen and you still don’t know how to woo a girl? When your dad was your age, he’d already been hooking up with that Li Xiaomei for a long time. And when *I* was your age, I’d already won your dad over." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Perhaps because she was truly disappointed in Shen Zhengfeng, Du Liya sounded remarkably calm and objective as she spoke.

Last night, she had been too upset to sleep. Then, her son brought her a thick stack of photos.

There were photos of Shen Zhengfeng with his mistress, Li Xiaomei, as well as photos of Shen Yi after being beaten up by that little bastard she’d had.

Looking at the photo of her son’s red, swollen face, Du Liya’s heart ached.

It was true that her son had a bad temper. When he was younger, he’d been particularly stubborn, even had violent tendencies, and would lash out at the slightest provocation. But when had he ever been beaten up like this?

It absolutely broke her mother’s heart!

So, she wasn’t just disappointed in Shen Zhengfeng anymore; she’d grown to hate the man, along with his mistress Li Xiaomei and her son!

Shen Yi humbly accepted his mother’s criticism, then asked earnestly, "Mom, what do you think I should do to win her over?"

Du Liya mulled it over for a moment before finally saying, "I can teach you how to win a girl over, but on one condition: you have to tell me about her. What’s her character like? What about her family? Are they good people? Let me tell you, some people are great at putting on an act. Take your father, for example. Back then, I thought he was a god descended from heaven—so gentle, so handsome, just unbelievably perfect. It wasn’t until after I married him that I found out what a bunch of trash his relatives are! So, Xiao Yi, you have to listen to your mother. Don’t be in a rush to pursue her. Let’s first figure out what she and her family are like, and then we’ll talk."