Chapter 6

Chapter 6

In my hazy memories of childhood, our family did have happy times.

My father was an entrepreneur, and my mother was a highly educated intellectual.

They were perfectly in tune with each other, a model couple in everyone else’s eyes.

Everything changed when I was seven.

My father went back to his hometown to visit an old friend and accidentally learned the truth: back then, it wasn’t that he had gotten drunk and made a mistake with my mother. My uncle had drugged him and set him up.

The consequence of that one-night affair was that my mother used her pregnancy to force him into marriage, and my father abandoned his first love.

Maybe their marriage, which had been happy enough, could have let him make the best of a bad situation and keep living peacefully as a family.

But the problem was that my father’s first love had killed herself after my parents got married.

And my father learned all of this when I was seven.

The seven-year itch.

By then, my mother had already been sleeping in my room for almost a year.

Old lovers had become bitter enemies, and the woman who had hung over my father’s heart like a white moonlight cast an impenetrable shadow over our home.

At first, my mother would still try to persuade him gently. She said, “It’s been so many years. You know how I’ve treated you. Don’t tear this family apart.”

But later, my father’s anger refused to fade. Especially after he was suppressed by my grandfather and uncle, his hatred became impossible to resolve.

After being tormented by my father, my mother lost all patience. She swung between frantic attempts to keep him and vicious curses, and there was no trace left of the quiet, refined woman she had once been.

Over time, I became the useless thing in my mother’s mouth, the daughter who couldn’t help her keep my father. In my father’s eyes, I became the accomplice who had dragged him into the mud.

They didn’t dare lay hands on each other, so they took turns mocking me, kicking me, and beating me. After leaving me covered in bruises, they seemed satisfied, as if they had avenged themselves on their greatest enemy.

When I was thirteen, I got my first period. The cramps left me tossing and turning in bed, drenched in cold sweat.

After enduring that anxious torment, I finally decided to ask my mother for help.

She gave a cold snort. “How did I raise such a useless thing like you? The moment you feel a little uncomfortable, you make a huge fuss. It’s because you’re like this that your father doesn’t like coming home.”

I endured the pain and called my father. There was silence on the other end for a while before his voice came through, cold as ice. “Like mother, like daughter. You’re talking to a grown man about private girl problems? Deep down, you’re just like your mother. Cheap!”

It was a rainy night. I walked for a long time with an umbrella, but I couldn’t find a pharmacy.

The wind was too strong and tore the umbrella out of my hands. I was soaked from head to toe, and the pain grew even worse.

My vision went black, then bright. When I woke up again, I was in the hospital. Sitting beside me was my friend, Geng Chen.

From the day I was admitted until the day I was discharged, I never saw a trace of my parents.

Just like in all the years that followed.