【It’s all fake! There’s definitely something wrong with this Lin family, it reeks of strangeness at every turn!】
【Seconded. Jiaojiao was tormented into that state, the Lins must be abusers.】
【Jiaojiao’s so thin she’s practically a paper cutout, severely malnourished, it’s got to be from this snake-hearted woman starving her, leaving her hungry all the time. And early on Jiaojiao was a bit meek and timid, super sensitive, easily startled, that’s post-traumatic stress for sure. This Lin family must have abused her plenty.】
【That’s definitely it. This woman beats even her own husband, and she’s the one who swapped the babies, so she had to have known Jiaojiao was the Shen family’s young miss. Of course she’d torment her half to death.】
The comments savaged Wang Yanqin, branding her vicious and violent, and to a one they pitied Shen Jiaojiao.
Brows furrowed, Lin Muyan read carefully through what the comments said, yet right before her eyes, her birth mother was plainly gentle, her face full of kindness.
The sheer disconnect left her, for the moment, without a clue.
Perhaps, as the comments said, she could wait and see, time would give her the answer.
If her birth mother really was the vicious woman they described, she’d reveal her true nature sooner or later, how long could anyone keep up the act?
She stepped out of the room and, after a moment’s thought, said:
“There’s no need to buy anything. Everything looks complete enough to me.”
At that, Father and Mother Lin breathed a sigh of relief. As long as their daughter didn’t find it beneath her, otherwise they’d have had to scrape together a way to rent her somewhere else.
Wang Yanqin glanced at her daughter’s luggage, just one backpack and a box of middling size, and asked, tentatively:
“Muyan, when you left the Shens, they didn’t give you a hard time, did they?”
“Did they hit you, curse at you? Say anything hurtful?”
Lin Muyan stared straight at Wang Yanqin, trying to read something in her expression, but there was nothing. Mother Lin’s eyes held only concern. She must have been overthinking it.
“They didn’t give me a hard time. Leaving was my own choice. I enjoyed twenty years of comfort at the Shens’, I came out ahead.”
Lin Muyan made it sound light, but her heart still ached. After an upheaval like this, reality was hard to accept all at once.
The comments were all saying she was putting on an act again, some of them maliciously second-guessing Mother Lin’s motives.
【Why ask so many roundabout questions? You just want to know whether your daughter brought anything valuable back from the Shens, don’t you? A higher-tier queen of fakery, all right, repulsive to look at.】
【She’s a brother-supporting demon [1] 扶弟魔, a woman who bleeds her own household dry to lavish everything on her natal family jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2620855_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2620855_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, anything the Lins have, she hauls off to her maiden family. That clan of leeches on her side is terrifying: they drain Wang Yanqin, and she drains Jiaojiao. The one who suffers most is our Jiaojiao. Look at this couple, healthy as can be, and only our Jiaojiao gets abused into that state.】
Lin Muyan watched the comments, her brows knitting again.
They weren’t entirely without reason, and this puzzled her too. Shen Jiaojiao’s condition certainly hadn’t formed in a day or two, it came from years of poor nourishment, a sickly kind of thinness.
Her birth parents, by contrast, the father, aged and weathered though he was, looked solid, plainly a man who did physical labor, his frame perfectly sound.
And the mother was even more striking, so fresh and lovely it would be no exaggeration to call her thirty, so well-kept she was worlds apart from Shen Jiaojiao.
Lin Muyan kept her distance from them throughout. After locking her things away in her room, she walked out into the courtyard.
By now a full table of dishes had been laid out there. Wang Yanqin was just setting down the last one, a fish, and quickly called Lin Muyan over to eat.
The food smelled wonderful, perfect in color, aroma, and taste, clearly the work of someone with real skill.
She swallowed, and her stomach betrayed her with a growl.
It was the height of the New Year, yet at the Shens’ she hadn’t gotten so much as a last warm meal, right now she really was starving, her belly all but touching her backbone.
“Muyan, your mother made all of this by hand. Her cooking’s no worse than a star-rated restaurant’s head chef, go on, give it a taste.”
The praise left Wang Yanqin a little flustered. “Your dad always exaggerates. How could I compare to a real chef? It’s just home cooking. As long as you don’t turn your nose up at Mom’s food, dear, that’s enough for me.”
Expressionless, Lin Muyan picked up a bite of red-braised pork, and her eyes lit up in spite of herself.
“It’s delicious!” The praise slipped out before she could stop it.
By rights, she’d tasted every delicacy under heaven, the Shen family banquets were cooked personally by Michelin-starred chefs. Her palate had long since grown picky, ordinary food simply didn’t pass her lips.
Yet to her surprise, her birth mother’s cooking truly was a match for those master chefs, even faintly surpassed them, as if it carried some uncommon flavor all its own.
Hearing her daughter’s praise, Wang Yanqin could hold back no longer, she hurriedly wiped at her tears, weeping as she spoke:
“If it’s good, eat more. From now on Mom will cook for you every single day.”
Lin Muyan’s chopsticks began to move faster, yet even so her movements stayed graceful, you’d never have guessed she was wolfing it down.
After eating her fill, Lin Muyan set down her bowl and chopsticks, finally ready to ask the question on her mind.
She didn’t pitch it straight, but said abruptly:
“When I was leaving the Shens, I saw Jiaojiao.”
At the mention of Jiaojiao’s name, Father and Mother Lin both flinched and traded a glance, but neither said a word.
Lin Muyan couldn’t tell what they were thinking, so she went on:
“Jiaojiao is thin as a rail. Her adoptive parents are heartbroken over it. They say they’ll hire the best doctors to nurse her back to health, and bring in forensic experts to examine her injuries and see whether she’s suffered long-term abuse.”
Lin Muyan wasn’t merely trying to scare them, she really had overheard her adoptive parents discussing it.
If the findings showed Shen Jiaojiao truly had been abused, the Shens would never let the matter rest.
That being so, this had to be gotten to the bottom of.
But seeing her birth parents look at each other, hemming and hawing, unwilling to bring it up, Lin Muyan set her face and demanded sternly:
“What exactly are you hiding?! Don’t tell me Jiaojiao’s condition wasn’t your doing. Look at you, you eat well enough, the food’s delicious. If Shen Jiaojiao had eaten normally, could she possibly have ended up like that?”
“The Shens’ wealth is staggering, their power reaches the heavens. You think this just blows over if you keep quiet?”
Lin Muyan’s chest heaved. She didn’t quite know why she’d flared up so badly, perhaps out of sympathy for Shen Jiaojiao’s plight, perhaps out of the irritation of learning she had parents like these.
Whatever the case, Shen Jiaojiao must have gone through something in the Lin household, and until it was cleared up, she didn’t dare go on living here.
References[+]