She looked at Su Wan, who had come out from behind Sun Guilan, in utter disbelief as her face quickly swelled up.
Su Wan shook her slightly numb palm and looked at her coldly.
“These two slaps are to teach you to recognize your own place!”
Before Sun Yujiao could even scream, Su Wan suddenly turned to her mother, who was standing in front of her protecting her. Her eyes were red as she pointed at Sun Yujiao and Su Jianmin and asked angrily,
“Mom! These two have been involved for a long time. All these years… did you really not know?!”
Those words were like a thunderclap exploding inside the house.
Su Jianmin’s face turned deathly pale in an instant, and Sun Yujiao’s scream got stuck in her throat.
Sun Guilan’s body stiffened violently.
Looking at her daughter’s angry yet heartbroken eyes, the tightly stretched string inside her for years finally snapped.
With a sudden “wa” sound, this woman who had endured silently for half her life squatted down and burst into heart-wrenching sobs, covering her face.
“I knew… how could I not know…”
Sun Guilan cried as if her heart were being torn apart, her voice filled with endless despair and grievance.
“For the past two years… they were right under my nose, flirting and exchanging glances… sometimes in the middle of the night… I could even hear it… wuwuwu… but Xiaowan, Mom was afraid… I was afraid that if we divorced, people would look down on you… afraid you wouldn’t have a complete family…”
Listening to her mother cry out, Su Wan felt as if her heart was being sliced by a knife.
So her mother had known all along she had been enduring this inhuman suffering in silence!
Exposed, Sun Yujiao flew into a rage out of humiliation. Covering her face, she pointed at Sun Guilan and cursed loudly,
“Sun Guilan, you good-for-nothing hen that can’t lay eggs! You couldn’t even give birth to a son, and you still won’t let Brother Jianmin find someone else? Besides, I did it for your family! Without my son to hold the funeral and light the incense, you two would die without anyone to send you off, not even a soul to burn paper offerings for you!”
“Shut your mouth!”
Su Jianmin, seeing everything exposed, was both ashamed and furious especially with Lu Zhaoye standing there as his son-in-law. His face had been completely stripped bare.
“It’s all reversed! Everything is reversed!”
Su Jianmin roared, his eyes red. He raised his hand and charged toward Su Wan and Sun Guilan,
“I’m going to kill you two jinxes today!”
He didn’t blame Sun Yujiao at all. Instead, all his anger was directed at “disobedient” Su Wan and “talkative” Sun Guilan.
That slap cut through the air, about to land on Su Wan’s face.
But halfway through, his hand seemed to hit a steel wall and could not move forward even an inch
A large hand clamped tightly around his wrist like iron tongs.
Su Jianmin froze and looked up, meeting a pair of ice-cold eyes.
Lu Zhaoye stood there with one hand in his pocket, the other effortlessly gripping Su Jianmin’s wrist. With just a slight squeeze, Su Jianmin’s face twisted in pain, cold sweat pouring down.
“Father-in-law,”
Lu Zhaoye’s voice was low, carrying a chilling ruthlessness word by word,
“Are you really so blind that you dare to lay a hand on my wife in front of me?”
The intense pain in his wrist distorted Su Jianmin’s face. He tried to struggle, but it felt like his hand was welded shut in iron clamps completely immovable.
Only when Su Jianmin was in so much pain that he was drenched in cold sweat and couldn’t even speak properly did Lu Zhaoye finally release him in disgust, flinging his hand away like trash.
Su Jianmin staggered backward several steps, crashing hard into a cabinet behind him. He winced in pain, clutching his swollen wrist, looking at Lu Zhaoye in terror. His previous arrogance vanished without a trace.
This man… was a demon!
The air in the room seemed to freeze.
Sun Yujiao also shrank back in fear, not daring to make a sound, afraid she would be the next one dealt with.
Su Wan ignored the trembling pair. She turned, knelt beside her mother, and gently wiped away her tears with a handkerchief.
“Mom, don’t cry.”
Her voice was soft, but carried unprecedented determination.
“Crying for people like that isn’t worth it.”
Sun Guilan trembled all over, her swollen eyes looking at her daughter as if she were someone else entirely. Her lips quivered.
“Xiaowan…”
Su Wan helped her mother up and sat her on a chair. Then she turned and looked coldly at Su Jianmin and Sun Yujiao.
“Since everything is already out in the open, then let’s settle it today.”
She took a deep breath and said firmly,
“Dad, I want you to divorce Mom.”
The words stunned everyone present.
In this era, divorce was considered a huge disgrace something that would make people point fingers for the rest of your life.
Su Jianmin looked as if he had heard something absurd. Forgetting his wrist pain, he widened his eyes and shouted,
“What did you say? Divorce?!”
On the chair, Sun Guilan trembled violently at the word “divorce,” as if she had been burned.
She looked up in panic and instinctively grabbed Su Wan’s hand, her voice trembling with fear and tears.
“Xiaowan… t-this won’t work… if I divorce, how can I ever face people again? I’ll be drowned in their spit… I…”
Even though her heart was already shattered, even though she knew about her husband and her own sister’s betrayal, decades of traditional thinking weighed on her like a mountain.
In this era, a divorced woman was like something unwanted pointed at wherever she went.
She had grown used to enduring, to compromising, even unable to imagine life without her husband.
Seeing her mother so fearful and withdrawn, Su Wan felt a wave of bitterness in her heart, tears almost falling again.
She held her mother’s rough, cracked hands tightly, squatted down so they were eye level, and spoke gently but firmly:
“Mom, after all these years of enduring, what did you get? You got their worsening abuse. You got treated like a servant. You were humiliated in front of your face! Do you really want to live like this forever? When you’re old, do you still want to serve them, watch them live happily as a family of three, while you sit like an outsider eating leftovers?”
Sun Guilan stiffened. Shock flashed across her face at how her daughter knew all this, and at the same time, painful memories surfaced. Her tears fell even harder.
“Mom, don’t be afraid.”
Su Wan gently wiped her tears away.
“You still have me. You still have Zhaoye. After the divorce, you can live with us, or we can rent you a place. You can do whatever you want. No one will ever show you a cold face again. No one will ever bully you again. What is reputation worth? Sacrificing your entire life for a man like this that’s what’s truly not worth it. You’re only in your forties. Your life is still long.”
Su Wan’s words were like a beam of light, shining into Sun Guilan’s dark and suffocating life.