Family Conflict

A year ago, on a whim, I told my wife a story.

Because the content was bizarre and the details were too realistic, she was scared out of her wits.

Afterwards, I deeply regretted it and emphasized countless times that the story was made up. But her trust in me had already collapsed, and the look in her eyes was filled with fear.

That night, she ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and called the police.

As a result, I ended up in jail.

Now, I am sorting out the whole incident as follows.

To win Jiang Bai over, I, a spoiled little princess with a monthly allowance of hundreds of thousands, spent three whole years pretending to be dirt poor.

All just so I could mooch meals and drinks off him.

But now his “white moonlight” has suddenly returned, and she even had the nerve to mock me for being a broke loser.

Fine! Great! You want to see who’s richer?

I’m done pretending!

The summer I turned ten, my younger sister went missing.

She vanished on her way to deliver lunch to our parents.

There were no security cameras, and no one had seen her.

Because I was the one who was supposed to have gone, my mother never spoke another word to me again.

Fifteen years later, I became a police officer. I retraced the path my sister took that day, over and over again.

The past began to resurface in my mind, piece by piece.

Slowly, I pieced together a heartbreaking truth.

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

Chapter 0

On April Fool’s Day, a pregnancy test with two distinct red lines fell out of my coat pocket.

I turned to my wife in surprise. “Are you pregnant with our second child?”

Her voice was flat. “Chen Wei, we haven’t had sex in six months.”

I froze for a second before quickly spinning a lie.

“It’s a prank prop! It’s April Fool’s Day, I was just messing with you. Gotcha, didn’t I?”

As soon as I stepped out of the house, I called my mistress to demand answers.

If she was pregnant, she needed to get an abortion immediately.

She had a worse temper than I did and denied it outright.

What a joke.

I only had two women in my life, and neither of them was pregnant.

Was this pregnancy test supposed to be mine?

During the year we fled the war, my mother saved a Princess Consort during labor, ensuring that both mother and daughter survived.

However, the barbarians arrived.

My mother told the Princess Consort to take us and flee first, while she stayed behind, sword in hand, to hold back the enemy.

With a single blade, she cut down countless foes, but in the end, she was simply outnumbered.

After her capture, she sought only the release of death.

Instead, they dislocated her arms and tore at her clothes, exposing her snow-white skin…

The Princess Consort and I were saved. However, the Princess Consort broke her word. She did not treat me like her own daughter.

Instead, she loathed my mother, claiming she had been rendered filthy and defiled by the barbarians.

Because of this, she made me her daughter’s personal maid.

Dad didn’t like me. I knew this from a very young age.

Because I wasn’t the boy he wanted.

To have a son, he sent me away, saying, “Sons are the roots, and I don’t lack daughters.”

Never having been loved, I was upset about it for a long time.

But when it came time for him to need support in his old age, he said, “Sons are unreliable; daughters are the most caring.”

“Second Sister, when Dad gets old, it’ll all be up to you!”

I was born with a rebellious streak. The more someone tells me not to do something, the more I insist on doing it.

When my older sister demanded I give up my spot in the dance competition and shoved me down the stairs, I carved up her face.

When my younger brother framed me for stealing money, and my parents slapped me across the face in the middle of the street without even asking what happened, I burned both their wallets.

When my parents refused to let me study out of province, I moved thousands of miles away just to spite them.

Later, my sister brought home a handsome, wealthy brother-in-law.

She warned me not to act like a slut in front of him.

That very night, I put on a pair of black Balenciaga stockings and red-bottom heels, then rubbed my leg against my brother-in-law’s under the table.