Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I went back to the place where my mother-in-law was living, only to be thrown out.

That apartment was He Chao’s and my marital home, a three-bedroom unit.

My parents and I had paid the down payment.

I found a shabby little hotel and settled in there for the time being.

It wasn’t long before the insurance company contacted me and asked me to prepare the documents needed to process the claim for He Chao’s death.

Lost in grief, I ignored them.

A woman whose beloved husband had just died shouldn’t have had the energy to care about anything beyond her sorrow.

I knew there were people who would be anxious on my behalf.

Insurance companies weren’t omniscient. They couldn’t possibly learn of an insured person’s death immediately, much less urge someone to file a claim.

The process should have begun with the insured person’s family, beneficiary, or policyholder reporting the death.

I hadn’t reported it at all.

As a grief-stricken widow, the last thing I should have thought about was the payout from my husband’s insurance.

The mistress must have talked my mother-in-law into secretly claiming the insurance money, only for them to be told that I was the only one who could collect it.

That was why the insurance company had called me.

They were probably planning to wait until I received the payout, then do what they had always done: berate me first, follow it with a few kind words, and have me obediently hand over the money.

He Chao had accident insurance and term life insurance.

Unlike critical illness insurance, those two types of policies offered high coverage for relatively low premiums. The potential payout was enormous compared to the cost.

Of course, there was no way he would have paid for insurance and named me as the beneficiary.

From the very beginning, those two policies had been meant to trade my life for a lifetime of wealth and luxury for their family of three and my mother-in-law.

The moment I signed my name on the policies was the moment I resolved to kill He Chao.

He Chao and I had met as coworkers seven years ago. He was exceptionally handsome and kind to everyone, and our colleagues all thought highly of him.

But in this materialistic world, he had one fatal flaw: he came from a rural village, had a widowed mother, and his family was penniless. In the big city, he had neither a car nor a home.

Sorry, that wasn’t meant to disparage people from the countryside. His rural background wasn’t the problem.

Even a local would have had to drain their family’s entire savings to buy a home.

With his family circumstances, the idea of buying an apartment and putting down roots in our city was nothing but a pipe dream.

He had attended an ordinary university, his abilities were unremarkable, and his family was poor. There was nothing exceptional about him. Unless a miracle happened, he was destined to spend his life stumbling along in mediocrity.

Girls in the big city, especially the women at our company, regularly dealt with wealthy, high-end businesspeople. Naturally, they had high standards.

He Chao might have been strikingly handsome, but the moment they saw what little he had to offer, they kept their distance.

My family was local, though we were just an ordinary working-class household.

But we owned property.

Two homes, in fact.

My parents lived in one. The other was the old apartment that had once belonged to my grandparents.

After my grandparents passed away, my parents inherited it.

The place was old and run-down, and my parents had bought another home years ago, so the old apartment had remained vacant.

I was also just another low-level employee at the company, the kind of person who disappeared into any crowd.

It was only natural that two ordinary people like us would gradually find our way to each other.

He Chao was warm and considerate. He treated me very well.

After dating for three years, marriage seemed like the natural next step.

He Chao’s family wasn’t well-off, so my parents didn’t ask for a bride price. They genuinely liked their son-in-law, too, so they pooled together some money for me. Combined with my savings, it was enough for the down payment on a modest three-bedroom apartment.

We didn’t want the mortgage to affect our quality of life, so we paid seventy percent up front.

Both our names were on the deed.

Our married life was sweet and happy. Every day, I cooked, washed dishes, cleaned, and did the housework. I lived like a traditional wife, supporting my husband and raising our children.

No, that wasn’t right. I didn’t have any children.

Three years into our marriage, I got pregnant. He Chao suggested bringing my mother-in-law to the city to take care of me.

I agreed, never imagining that it would be the beginning of my nightmare.

At first, my mother-in-law treated me quite well. Every day, she asked what I wanted to eat and offered to cook it for me, saying I mustn’t let her precious grandchild go hungry.

Whenever I went for a walk, she would support me by the arm and tell me not to tire out her precious grandchild.

Whenever she said “grandchild,” I assumed she meant either a grandson or a granddaughter.

I didn’t think much of it at first. Everyone in the neighborhood said I was blessed to have such a wonderful mother-in-law.

One day, my mother-in-law once again gave me an unbearably sour orange, insisting that her grandson was sure to love it. I responded with a joke.

“Mom, how do you know it’s a grandson? What if it’s a granddaughter?”

To my surprise, her expression changed on the spot.

She said a woman’s duty was to bear sons. He Chao was her only son, and if I didn’t give birth to a boy, the He Family bloodline would end.

A woman who couldn’t bear a son was no better than a hen that couldn’t lay eggs.

I was stunned. I had never imagined that the mother-in-law who treated me so well held such feudal beliefs.

That evening, I told He Chao what had happened. To my surprise, he felt exactly the same way.

He went on about how hard it had been for his mother to raise him alone.

After he spent ages coaxing me, I stopped dwelling on it. Older people tended to think that way, and whether the baby in my belly was a boy or a girl, the child would still bear the He surname. Surely they wouldn’t reject their own child just for being a girl, would they?

I had grossly underestimated how cruel people could be.

When I was five months pregnant, He Chao took me to a prenatal checkup, and my mother-in-law came along. The two of them acted strangely secretive that day.

After we returned from the hospital, my mother-in-law’s attitude toward me did a complete one-eighty.

Gone was her attentiveness. She glared at me all day, ordering me around and cursing me as a useless wretch, a jinx who would leave the He Family without an heir, and a hen that couldn’t lay eggs.

I suspected they had pulled some strings that day and learned the baby’s sex.

Then, after enduring their torment, I had an accident and lost my baby more than five months into the pregnancy.

I could never become a mother again.