Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Halfway through class, Pei Yingzhang suddenly received a call from Song Zhiyu.

Before this, their relationship had long been frozen over. The two of them would only exchange a few words when Song Qiyu caused a scene over her stepmother.

His first reaction was that something had happened to Song Qiyu. Instead, Song Zhiyu was asking him to go to his maternal grandfather and inquire about human traffickers in C City.

Song Qiwen had been abducted.

Although Pei Yingzhang disliked and rejected the child, it was still a human life.

People could not choose the circumstances of their birth, and the grudges of adults should never be dragged onto children.

Pei Yingzhang asked his maternal grandfather for help. After a moment of silence, the other man said, “You are too softhearted.”

Softhearted?

He did not know how to answer. He negotiated with his maternal grandfather for a long time, all the way until evening, when Song Qiyu messaged him to say the child had been found.

Public security in C City had not been good in those years, so he was somewhat surprised by the speed of the police this time.

Only later did he learn that Song Zhiyu had been extremely lucky. Outside a shopping mall, he ran into the traffickers stealing his watch. Because the value was high, the police checked the surveillance footage and discovered a little girl placing Song Qiwen’s hair ribbon outside a supermarket.

Her unusual action became the key to solving the case.

Fate circled round and round, writing people’s stories into something absurd and melodramatic. No one had expected that she would turn out to be the child of his stepmother and her ex-husband.

Her biological father had become addicted to gambling and had abandoned her long ago. Whether he was alive or dead was unknown. Only her biological mother was her guardian, so she was brought back to the Song family.

However, Pei Yingzhang did not see her the next day.

Song Qiyu privately asked him why she had not seen her.

Pei Yingzhang only said she was resting in her room.

He had no way to tell Song Qiyu that the cruelty of the world lay in the fact that some people gave birth to children yet did not take responsibility for them, instead treating them as burdens.

Some people were loved, and some were not. The gap between them brewed tragedy.

For several dozen days in a row, she did not appear in their sight, as if she had never existed.

Not until Song Qiyu’s birthday. In the morning, they went to the stables. In the afternoon, they held a party.

The Song family and the Pei family invited many people.

The entire villa was filled with noise and voices. Overly lively occasions were actually draining. Moreover, Pei Yingzhang still had to watch over Song Qiyu and keep her from charging at her stepmother with a knife the moment they disagreed.

After half a day, he was somewhat exhausted and decided to spend ten minutes finding a quiet place to rest.

He quietly came to the garden and sat on the swing, facing that room cut off from the world.

Through the bright glass, he saw her sitting at the desk. Her back was like the little prince guarding his rose.

He thought of a sentence: “One day, I watched the sunset forty-four times. You know, when people are sad, they fall in love with sunsets.”

She must have been very sad.

But at that moment, he could only watch from across the river. He had no standing to take part in her life.

That evening, Song Qiyu’s necklace went missing. It was a gift from her mother, and she was determined to find it.

The hall and the rooms were searched thoroughly, but nothing was found. Then someone said Song Qiwen had gone to that girl’s room that afternoon. What followed was self-evident.

She had a record, so it was normal for people to connect the dots. What was astonishing was that her own mother also believed she was the culprit, only denying it for the sake of face.

Song Qiyu saw that her stepmother felt guilty and slapped the table, deciding to have Auntie Zhuang bring the girl over.

Pei Yingzhang spoke up to stop her, but he could not win against Song Qiyu.

The girl was dragged over from bed without shoes, standing alone in the hall against everyone. Her black-and-white eyes once again reminded him of the moment she had looked up at him.

For the first time, Pei Yingzhang wondered if he had spoiled Song Qiyu too much, letting her rush to condemn someone before the truth had come to light.

The housekeeper was checking the surveillance footage. Song Qiyu was still angry, and only when the girl staggered in the wind did she speak and tell her to sit down.

Her tone was hardly friendly. Pei Yingzhang decided that today, he had to correct this small bad habit of Song Qiyu’s.

When the truth came out, he saw mist and resolution rise in the girl’s eyes.

As he took Song Qiyu away, the girl glanced at her mother. The latter did not care at all. As if having made some decision, she turned and left.

She was probably planning to leave this place.

But a ten-year-old girl had nowhere to go except an orphanage.

That night, he looked into her information and learned her name. She was called Liang Yu.

Since the age of six, she had been inside Siniang’s criminal gang, sold into it by her father to pay off debts.

After Pei Yingzhang finished reading, he could not come back to himself for a long time. He had never imagined the world could be this deranged.

So she had suffered torment from such a young age. He could not even imagine how she had endured those four years in the hands of traffickers.

He began to regret not catching her hand at the amusement park.

After thinking it over, Pei Yingzhang instructed the housekeeper to send her to a boarding school in her mother’s name. From his position, this was all he could do.

What came next would depend on her own fate.