Chapter 4

Early the next morning, my secretary came to pick me up. “President Su, the money’s been withdrawn. Everyone’s been told the meeting starts at eight.”

I’d barely reached the door when I saw our unwelcome visitor, Xu Yao.

My irritation ignited. I called Zhou Jinyi and snapped, “Are you blind? What kind of woman are you keeping? She keeps turning up while I’m working. Do you think I have as much time to waste as you?”

Hearing my voice, Xu Yao turned and came toward me in tears. “Miss Su, I’m sorry.”

Both her hands were wrapped in bandages. Zhou Jinyi’s icy voice came through the phone. “See? Are you satisfied now, Su Nan?”

“A pair of lunatics,” I said, speechless.

After I bought back the shares held by the company’s parasites, my secretary began recruiting according to my instructions.

That evening, while I worked overtime, Zhou Jinyi arrived.

“We need to discuss a few wedding details with your parents. I’ll go home with you tonight.”

My fingers stiffened on the keyboard. I murmured assent, took my coat, and followed him to the car.

The back seat and trunk were full of health supplements and expensive cigarettes and liquor. I frowned. “Is this necessary? I don’t want to spend money on them.”

He looked at me and coaxed helplessly, “Whatever else they are, they’re still your parents.”

We drove in silence. The courtyard was empty.

When the lock rejected my fingerprint, the anger I’d been holding down boiled over.

Ignoring Zhou Jinyi’s attempts to stop me, I called someone to force the lock.

The first thing I saw was my mother smiling at my father’s illegitimate son, asking with the utmost concern whether work was tiring him out and whether he was eating properly.

It was almost funny. In all my years abroad, she’d never called me once.

Yet here she was, fussing over the son my father had had with another woman.

What a fucking joke. This was my own mother.

I looked at Zhou Jinyi and forced the words out one by one, trying not to sound like a dog driven from its home.

“Let’s go. There’s nothing to discuss with them.”

He held my hand, his gaze icy. “This is your home. If anyone leaves, it shouldn’t be you.”

For a moment, my mother looked ashamed. Sensing the atmosphere, my father sent the other man outside.

Everything here made me feel sick and suffocated. With difficulty, I pulled my hand free of Zhou Jinyi’s. “I’ll wait in the car. Discuss whatever you need to with them.”

By the time Zhou Jinyi came downstairs, I was already fighting with my father’s illegitimate son, Su Che.

My mother had been my maternal grandparents’ only child. Instead of enjoying her life as a beautiful, wealthy heiress, she’d insisted on marrying a poor man: my father, the social climber.

She’d threatened to die for him and infuriated my grandmother so badly it killed her.

She ignored the company entirely. It was as if a dog had eaten her brains; she seemed to live only to beg for my father’s love.

She’d ruined a perfectly good family business.

If Zhou Jinyi’s mother hadn’t been her longtime friend and helped us when our cash flow broke down, we’d have gone bankrupt long ago.

The year I sat my high-school entrance exams, home was chaos.

My grandparents died one after the other. My father took control of the company and stripped my mother of most of her authority.

His mistress brought along a son my age and tried to install herself in our home.

Every day, my mother held me and cried, saying she wished I’d been a boy.

I was so sick of it that I simply went berserk.

I climbed over a wall that night and beat up the mistress, went straight for my father’s crotch with a knife, and called my mother a spineless coward.

“If you couldn’t have his son, why didn’t you have someone else’s? You’re all insane!”

Afterward, instead of supporting me, my mother slapped me twice and dragged me to the hospital to apologize to my father.

“Whatever he’s done to me, he’s still your father! How could you hurt him with a knife?”

I only grew more frenzied. Even with my face swollen from her slaps, I refused to apologize.

“Then why did you complain to me about him?” I demanded, full of loathing. “If he’s my father, if this is between you adults, why did you come crying to me? You brought this on yourself. You deserve it!”

My mother nearly beat me to death that day.

Su Che repeatedly waited outside my school to provoke and humiliate me.

“Dad bought me these new clothes. You don’t have any, do you?”

“Dad gave me this for my birthday. He brought it all the way from abroad.”

“Know why Dad didn’t come home on your birthday? He was with me.”

“Su Nan, Dad hates you. He said everything the Su family owns is mine. You won’t get a thing.”

“Sooner or later, I’ll throw you out.”

…

He smiled smugly at me. I scratched his face in a fury.

He was a head and a half taller than me. Every time we fought, I was utterly overpowered and beaten.

My mother never cared about my injuries.

All she did was wallow in self-pity and misery, crying and begging the intruder to give her husband back.

I’d been absolutely right to call her spineless.

Later, Su Che injured his own head until it was covered in blood and blamed me.

My mother didn’t believe me. Crying, she joined my father in arranging my admission to a psychiatric hospital.

Sometimes, when I could barely go on, I’d remind myself that those people were still alive and well. Why should I be the one to die?

I was going to live in this world, even if all I could do was scrape by. I intended to reach a hundred.

I hadn’t buried them yet.