Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Whenever my brother went out to work, Lin Shishi would retreat into her own little world in the storage room, refusing to come out.
She had tried to please our parents by playing the role of a virtuous daughter-in-law, but the results were disastrous.
She nearly set the kitchen on fire while cooking. She ruined Mom’s dry-clean-only clothes by throwing them in the washing machine. She even managed to overfeed the goldfish to death and overwater the orchid Dad had painstakingly nurtured for ten years.
Though I felt that flower looked identical to the one Mom bought at a street stall last year.
“Ah Ji must have lost his mind! How could he threaten to cut ties with us over a useless piece of trash like her?” Mom said, intentionally raising her voice so Lin Shishi could hear her.
“I heard her own parents kicked her out. Can you imagine how awful she must be for her own flesh and blood to abandon her?”
“If it weren’t for the blood relation, a kid like that probably wouldn’t be wanted by anyone from the day she was born!”
“There isn’t a single likable quality about her!”
“You don’t think… she actually killed someone, do you?”
“I always feel like there’s a certain smell on her…”
Mom really knew how to twist the knife.
Stripped of her pampered lifestyle, this able-bodied young lady was utterly incompetent. Moreover, her past superiority had indeed been entirely dependent on her bloodline.
Her biological mother wasn’t Madam Lin, but a mistress. When Shishi was very young, her mother took the settlement money from her father and started a new life, leaving her behind like a shameful stain on her history.
She had lived in the Lin Family, enjoying a life of luxury and the privileges of the elite. Yet, beneath that glamorous facade, she was nothing more than a pathetic creature discarded by her parents after they weighed their options.
The insults outside the door were relentless.
Inside the storage room, Lin Shishi grabbed a bottle of perfume and sprayed it frantically all over herself. The bottle was nearly empty and her clothes were damp, but it still didn’t feel like enough.
She constantly felt like she was stinking.
Previously, my brother would occasionally take her out for a walk in the evening. Every passerby who walked past her would raise a hand to cover their nose, eyeing her with strange expressions.
She was convinced they recognized her as the girl from the mall who had been covered in poop. She felt as though the stench had never truly vanished.
She was gripped by a panic so intense it felt as if she were being stripped naked in the middle of the street.
After that, she stopped going out entirely.
No one told her that the reason people were reacting that way was actually because her perfume was so suffocatingly strong.
And as the internet’s focus shifted to new scandals every day, people had long since stopped caring about her.