That day five years ago the little ways I had made with Kenji went down the drain.

It was the day that he asked me to teach him the Hiten-Mitsurugi Ryu and I had refused.

That day, the thin threat that held our relationship got severed.

Maybe I should have agreed to teach him, but now it was too late to repent. Even if I offered now, my son was beyond my reach.

He was a young man now; the walls around him were thick and unbreakable. There are times that I look at him and want to cry for him, not because of his rejection of me, but because he seems so very lonely.

My son, the person that I would give my life for, is a lonely young man and it is my fault. He would never bear his soul to anyone, he won't even open up to his mother. He has build around him a wall, just like Soujiro-san had done years ago, in order not to be hurt.

I have now remembered a memory from long ago, something that I had tried to forget, it was the day my son stopped loving me. The day he started to build that wall around him. It was the day after two years of marriage when I awoke and I knew the answer, it was the day when I realized that I could never love Kaoru as a woman.

The day I started avoiding her, that was the day he saw my rejection of his mother, her tears, her broken heart because she didn't know why I avoided her, and my inability to comfort her, to tell her the everything was alright, that it was only a temporary phase.

That day, his heart also broke.

There was not going to be a happy family or a father to be proud of or a strong mother. All that was going to be was loneliness, a broken mother and an uncaring father.

I remember those blue eyes full of hurt; then those same blue eyes became cold and uncaring towards me. And since then, those blue eyes have been following my every move, looking, waiting, to see me hurt the woman he loves the most.

On that day, he had lost all respect for me.

Since then, the boy grew hostile. In order not to be hurt again, he took a haughty attitude, an attitude that annoyed more than one. That was the major difference between Soujiro-san's wall and my son's. Soujiro-san put all his emotions in a box and locked them away deep within his heart, my son decided to keep all the negative ones on the surface.

"May I have a word with you?" I ask my son, who's facing away from me.

"If you must. Was is it that you want?"

"Why did you challenge me in front of your mother?"

"Oh so you did catch it? I'm impressed." He said sarcastically.

I say nothing.

"You know I hate you, don't you?" he suddenly tells me.

I knew all along that he didn't like me, but those words pierced through my heart. He had never told me that before and the full meaning of his words hurt. They hurt a lot.

I quietly leave him alone, salty tears running down my cheeks.

That wall kept getting thicker and thicker.