Chapter 3

Chapter 3

When Mom was alive, she knew my aunt had it hard and often helped her out. So no matter how unhappy my aunt might have been with my uncle, her gratitude toward my mother never changed.

Wei Yao’s intentions were plain as day, and my aunt was absolutely not about to let her have an easy time of it.

She went straight to Wei Yao’s workplace, produced evidence that Wei Yao had interfered in my parents’ marriage while it was still intact, and demanded that the unit fire her.

A matter of morals like that wasn’t considered a huge deal. Usually, it would earn a warning, everyone would laugh about it for a while, and then it would pass. But my aunt refused to let it go. In the end, the workplace had no choice but to suspend Wei Yao without pay and transfer her out of her position.

My aunt won that battle in glorious fashion. She swaggered over and flung the evidence right in Wei Yao’s face, warning her that if there was a next time, it wouldn’t just be a job she lost.

Wei Yao hated her so much her teeth itched, but she was only the kind of delicate little schemer who stirred men up from the shadows. Faced with a shrew like my aunt, someone no one in the family dared provoke, she simply couldn’t win.

With no income of her own, she set her sights on my father’s salary card.

My dad was weak-willed. Although he didn’t hand the card over, he did start giving her more money every month to comfort her.

Before, all the legitimate income in our household had been managed by my mother. Now my father’s money no longer came home, and it was my maternal grandparents who helped cover the family’s daily expenses.

Grandma was practically a living bodhisattva. Even after moving in, she never treated my father harshly.

Whenever she made something delicious for me, she would always call Grandpa along and send a portion to my paternal grandparents as well. The older generation still visited one another like ordinary in-laws.

In conversation, whenever that other woman came up, Grandpa would always sigh sorrowfully and say, “Perhaps it was that woman who angered Shuqin to death. In-laws, we all know you are upright people. There’s no way your whole family would gang up to bully my daughter. But just because the father is decent doesn’t mean the son has to be decent too. In the end, my daughter was the one who couldn’t get past it.”

My paternal grandfather was a blunt, straightforward man who had stood tall his whole life. How could he possibly endure hearing that?

He called my father over and scolded him twice. After that, Dad started coming home less and less.

He didn’t want to live under the same roof as his in-laws, so he moved in with Wei Yao.

That woman had lost face after being driven in and out of my home, and then my aunt had gone after her at work, leaving people pointing at her behind her back and laughing. With no other choice, she clung to my father even more tightly. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for two or three weeks at a time.