Less than two minutes later, an urgent voice came through the phone. “Xinxin, Xinxin, is that you?”
Although Lu Jiaguang had kept searching, he’d already prepared himself for the worst. Now that his little cousin had suddenly turned up, he was both overjoyed and afraid, afraid it might all turn out to be a false hope.
Lu Jiaxin’s nose stung, and tears fell without her meaning them to as she choked out, “Big Brother, it’s me, I’m back.”
She herself could control her emotions well enough, this must be the body’s own instinctive reaction.
“Xinxin, where are you right now?”
“I’m at home. I just called Dad too. Big Brother, please come quickly, my failing the exam and getting kidnapped were both schemes by that woman, but Dad only listens to her. I can’t win against her alone.”
Hearing this, Lu Jiaguang’s heart jolted. He’d suspected as much before, just without any proof. “I’ll come right now. You stay put at home and wait, don’t go anywhere.”
“Okay.”
Next, Lu Jiaxin called her fifth cousin Lu Jiajie, as well as her mother’s close friend Liao Xiangmei. She had two purposes in calling them over: first, to explain to them that she hadn’t run away from home but had simply wanted to go clear her head at the old hometown, and second, to have them serve as witnesses.
Once she’d finished the calls, Lu Jiaxin unplugged the phone line, then said to Xue Mao, “I’m going into the room to get something. If someone calls for you to open the door, don’t open it without my say-so.”
“Okay.”
Lu Jiaxin went into the original owner’s room. Everything inside was arranged neatly, but the positions didn’t match her memory. She had no time to worry about that, she lifted the bamboo mat and the folded quilt on the bed and pulled out a key hidden in the bed frame.
This key had been given to the original owner by her mother on her deathbed. Lu Jiaxin’s grandmother had died young, and her mother too had grown up under a stepmother’s abuse. Fearing that her own daughter would suffer the same fate at a stepmother’s hands after she was gone, she’d secured a property for her daughter before she died. Once Lu Hongjun remarried, he’d cared only about his new wife and given no thought to his daughter’s welfare, this apartment was meant to be the daughter’s fallback.
The key was light, but it felt to Lu Jiaxin like it weighed a thousand pounds. For her daughter’s sake, the mother had exhausted every ounce of thought and care, yet the very thing she’d feared most had happened anyway, the original owner hadn’t even lived to adulthood before she died.
Having found the key, Lu Jiaxin went looking for the bankbook next. According to her memory, it had been kept inside a book in the bottom drawer of the desk. Unfortunately, she went through every book in the drawer and found nothing, it went without saying that the bankbook had been taken. But she quickly discovered it wasn’t just the bankbook that was missing, every item of any value in the room was gone. Even the wardrobe full of clothes had been stripped down to just three pairs of shoes and socks with holes in them.
The original owner had only been missing a little over a month, and already the room had been picked clean. If it had gone on much longer, every trace of her having lived here would have been erased.
“Bang, bang, bang…”
The knocking pulled Lu Jiaxin’s thoughts back to the present. She pocketed the key and went back out.
Seeing her, Xue Mao said in dialect, “Sister Xin, we might as well open the door, if we don’t, the people outside will break it down.”
The moment he finished speaking, the knocking outside stopped, and then a voice rang out, one she knew all too well. “Jiaxin, Jiaxin, open the door quickly, it’s your Auntie Ding.”
Auntie Xue, who never minded stirring up a bigger show, said with biting sarcasm, “Ding Jing, Jiaxin just said she ran off to the old hometown all by herself because of you and Zhao Siyi. Ding Jing, what exactly did the two of you, mother and daughter, do to keep Jiaxin from even getting into a vocational college?”
Ding Jing’s heart leapt into her throat at this, but she reasoned that since the original owner hadn’t spoken up before, she probably wouldn’t now either. With that thought, she quickly composed herself. “Auntie Xue, don’t go spreading rumors here. Jiaxin sprained her ankle two days before the exam and it threw off her performance, everyone already knows this.”
Auntie Xue wasn’t the least bit intimidated. “This isn’t something I made up out of thin air, Jiaxin said it herself. Auntie Zhao and the others were all there, everyone heard it clear as day.”
Naturally Ding Jing wouldn’t admit to it. “That’s all nonsense. Jiaxin bombed the exam because she carelessly sprained her ankle and it threw off her state of mind, it has nothing to do with anyone else.”
Lu Jiaxin had originally planned to wait for her father and Lu Jiaguang to arrive before opening the door, but now she changed her mind.
The moment she opened the door, she saw Ding Jing, one of the people the original owner despised most. Even knowing this woman had a heart like a snake and scorpion, Lu Jiaxin had to admit she really was good-looking, skin pale and delicate, phoenix eyes seductive and misty, wearing a fitted jujube-red dress that traced out her slender waist. Nearly forty, she looked no different from a woman in her thirties, and she was full of feminine charm.
The moment Auntie Xue saw her, she said, “Jiaxin, you just said your exam failure was all because of Ding Jing and her daughter. Jiaxin, is that true or not?”
Lu Jiaxin said, “Yes. My exam failure was because of Zhao Siyi and Ding Jing.”
Ding Jing could no longer keep up her composed, dignified bearing. “Jiaxin, I know you don’t like me or Siyi, and you’ve suffered out there this past month, but you can’t just slander me and Siyi because you didn’t get into university.”
The original owner had cared too much about appearances to ever say what really happened, but Lu Jiaxin was only too glad to see Zhao Siyi’s name dragged through the mud. “Zhao Siyi and Fan Yinuo were kissing and groping in the alley. I was shocked and furious and yelled at her, and she shoved me down and I sprained my ankle…”
Fan Yinuo was the youngest son of Liao Xiangmei, the original owner’s mother’s close friend, and the original owner had even taken Liao Xiangmei as a godmother. The two children had been engaged since infancy, but while Fan Yinuo had only ever thought of the original owner as a little sister, the original owner had taken it seriously and viewed him as her future husband.
Having witnessed with her own eyes her beloved fiancé together with Zhao Siyi, a woman she despised, the shock to the original owner could well be imagined. But the original owner was hopelessly foolish, and even after the incident she’d worried about damaging Fan Yinuo’s reputation, so she’d told no one and simply endured it alone. Even the sprained ankle, she’d claimed was her own clumsy accident.
Now that Lu Jiaxin had taken over this body, she had no such qualms. Everyone had to answer for their own actions, and Fan Yinuo was no exception, if you dare to do it, you’d better be ready to bear the consequences.
That Zhao Siyi had gotten tangled up with Lu Jiaxin’s own fiancé was such an explosive piece of gossip that the crowd forgot to breathe.
Ding Jing cut her off loudly. “Jiaxin, Fan Yinuo is your godmother’s son. To slander Siyi you’re even dragging him into it, how can you be so heartless?”
Lu Jiaxin laughed lightly. “He and Zhao Siyi have been a couple for a while now, sneaking off to meet in secret all the time. If anyone bothers to look into it properly, they’ll know whether I’m slandering them or not.”
“These days it’s a new society that values freedom in love and marriage. A childhood betrothal really is a feudal relic. But this match was arranged by our elders, if he wasn’t happy with it, he should have called off the engagement first, instead of secretly carrying on with Zhao Siyi behind everyone’s back.”
This remark won the crowd’s agreement. You could disagree with a childhood betrothal, but you should call off the engagement before dating someone else. What Fan Yinuo had done amounted to cheating, and for Zhao Siyi to knowingly go after her stepsister’s fiancé was not only vile but morally corrupt.
Watching the crowd’s expressions of contempt, Lu Jiaxin felt deeply satisfied. That foolish little original owner had thought that if she just quietly endured it for a few years and got into university, she could escape this disgusting mother and daughter. She’d never imagined that this vicious, scheming pair had been plotting all along to make her disappear from this family entirely.