Clearly, Mrs. Shen didn’t want the scandal of the Shens having raised the wrong heiress to become common knowledge, and in the Half-Mountain Villa district she’d worked hard to keep the matter under wraps.
At the very least, people like the guard squad hadn’t yet gotten wind of the Shens’ gossip, Mrs. Shen didn’t want even these ordinary folks wagging their tongues about the family.
So she had no choice but to laugh it off.
“Looks like it was all a misunderstanding. You may go, I’ll handle the rest.”
Lin Muyan hurried forward to help Lin Xiao up. Seeing the injuries on his face, one hand still clutching his breastbone, he’d evidently taken a beating, she couldn’t hold back a sharp question.
“You hit him? Before you’d even sorted things out, what gives you the right to beat someone?”
Lin Xiao’s fine, handsome face had been beaten black and blue. He was hurt no lightly, yet he didn’t want to make a big scene, lest it sour relations.
“You’re Muyan, my little sister?”
Lin Muyan nodded, and Lin Xiao quickly said:
“Sis, I’m fine, let’s go.”
Lin Muyan wouldn’t have it. She stared the guards down, saw the stun batons still in their hands, and said coldly with knitted brows:
“Who gave you permission to use violence to enforce the rules? If you’d crippled him, how would you have made it right?”
“This…”
The guard who’d done the hitting looked to Mrs. Shen for help, the latter’s eyes darted away, and Lin Muyan saw it then, it was Mrs. Shen who had directed the guards to beat Lin Xiao.
Lin Muyan guessed that perhaps Mrs. Shen truly hated the Lin family to the bone, so when Lin Xiao revealed his identity, wanting to see his former sister, Mrs. Shen acted on a private grudge, deliberately branding Lin Xiao a villain so the guards would beat him.
What she’d never imagined was how the once gentle, kind adoptive mother could be so incapable of telling right from wrong.
If she had to hate, she shouldn’t hate the younger generation. What did any of this have to do with Lin Xiao, that she’d go and nearly beat him into a cripple?
“Sis, I’m fine, let’s go. Will you take me to the hospital, okay?”
Lin Xiao didn’t want to pursue it, and was afraid this newly reclaimed sister would set herself against the Shens for his sake.
This was his own oversight, his own failure to foresee how quickly Shen Jiaojiao had forgotten him.
Or perhaps she’d never truly thought of the Lin family as her home at all.
Ever since her rebellious adolescence, Jiaojiao had changed, grown vain, forever fantasizing that she was a princess who ought to enjoy the finest life in the world. Every day she scorned the family for being poor, and even turned vicious, saying their parents were useless, that if they couldn’t afford children, why have so many.
At the time, as her big brother, he’d only figured his sister had hit her rebellious phase, he’d been through one too, and that after a while she’d come around on her own and accept reality.
But she never did. From start to finish, Jiaojiao never grew out of that rebellion.
The very moment she learned she was the Shens’ true young miss, she threw away everything their parents had ever bought her, and burned all her dresses and clothes too.
She looked down on the whole family with smug satisfaction and spat out those wounding words:
“You can all go on cramming into this garbage heap and living your miserable lives. This young lady is off to enjoy hers.”
Without a backward glance she left, fleeing the Lin family she’d despised for so many years.
Yet Lin Xiao had still worried about her, worried that her unlikeable temperament might get her bullied and targeted at the Shens, and had come to confirm she was all right, to have her back.
And the result? He hadn’t even gotten to see Jiaojiao’s face, and Mrs. Shen, without distinguishing right from wrong, had ordered him beaten.
Ah, had those twenty years really held any love, any kindness at all?
He felt his parents had been done wrong…
Listening to her big brother’s almost pleading words, Lin Muyan’s feelings churned in great complexity.
She lifted her head to look at Mrs. Shen. She wanted to face this adoptive mother with the same yearning, childlike devotion she once had, but now, she found she could no longer do it.
At some point she couldn’t pinpoint, Mrs. Shen had come to feel like a stranger to her. Everything about the Shen house felt utterly strange now, as though it were entirely different from the home she’d lived in for twenty years.
Pinned by Lin Muyan’s gaze, Mrs. Shen felt a crawling unease, and the spectating stares of the guards stung her eyes. She hastily said with a forced little laugh:
“Er, Muyan dear, why don’t you take him to the hospital? I’ll send a car for you both.”
Mrs. Shen did feel a twinge of guilt, but what she feared more was Lin Muyan being here and undercutting her dignity in front of all these guards.
The Shen family’s face mattered most of all, it couldn’t be ruined by some bit player like this.
Lin Muyan pressed her lips tight and flatly refused Mrs. Shen.
“No need. I’ll take him myself. And please, Mrs. Shen, from now on, when you see us Lin family members, don’t go straight to mindless violence. That’s hardly conduct befitting a wealthy madam.”
“And one more thing: what happened twenty years ago may not be the way you all think. You’re welcome to investigate. Believe me, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Lin family.”
That said, Lin Muyan made to turn and leave, supporting Lin Xiao. Then, remembering something, she added without looking back:
“Oh, and, Jiaojiao is ill, and her condition can’t be put off. She has to report to the psychiatric department at the city hospital nearly every month. If you have the time, Mrs. Shen, you ought to take her to get checked soon, don’t delay her treatment.”
With that, Lin Muyan swept off, suddenly feeling clear-headed and refreshed.
She didn’t quite know what it was, she was simply very angry.
She’d originally meant to go to the city hospital herself and check whether Shen Jiaojiao really did go there often for treatment, but in that one moment, she’d changed her mind.
She’d tell the adoptive mother about it outright. Call it cruel of her if you like, the Shens had to be told this eventually, so let Mrs. Shen go look into it herself.
Not long after Lin Muyan left, an earth-shaking piece of gossip spread through Half-Mountain Villa.
The guards had always thought the dynamic between Mrs. Shen and Miss Shen was strange, Mrs. Shen seemed to guard against Miss Shen as if she were a thief.
So they began working their various back-channel connections, picking the thing apart thread by thread, and finally got hold of the gossip, two days late.
The Shen Muyan of the Shen household had turned out to be the fake heiress, swapped at birth. The Shens’ true young miss had been brought home, but word was she’d been living worse than a pig or a dog out there, looking like a beggar when they took her back…
Lin Muyan took Lin Xiao to the hospital. Fortunately it was all just surface wounds, a bit of bandaging and he was fine.
The brother and sister sat face to face in a restaurant for the first time, and Lin Xiao was visibly nervous.
He’d hurried back early this morning just to see this birth sister, hadn’t managed it, and then run into her by chance at the Shen house, in such a sorry state, no less.
Now and then Lin Xiao stole a glance at this sister, swapped away for twenty years, his heart full of feelings he couldn’t put into words.
She was so refined, her gaze all composure and confidence, every inch someone raised in a great house.
Would a person this outstanding really choose to live with the Lin family as it was now? Would she acknowledge the Lins from the bottom of her heart?
Lin Muyan knew her big brother was sizing her up, and let him look without minding. But even after all the dishes had arrived, he still hadn’t said a word, and Lin Muyan couldn’t help sighing.
“I know you have a lot of questions for me. You can just ask.”
In fact Lin Xiao was only four years her senior. Thanks to the Shen family’s resources, she’d finished all her schooling by twenty, graduating the same as Lin Xiao.
By rights, her experience and learning far outstripped his.
So in spending time with him, she found it a little hard to think of this young man before her as her big brother.
Before elders she might deliberately lower her bearing, but with someone her own age there was no need for that.
Lin Xiao suddenly felt an immense pressure, marveling inwardly: his second sister truly was someone who’d spent twenty years as a wealthy young miss, that presence really was something else.