My sister, whom I raised, has turned evil after faking her death for three years.

Jiang Yi looked at the door in the side hall that Uncle Wu had gently closed from the outside, and finally let out a groan from her nose after holding her breath for so long.

She turned to Jiang Ren, her brows furrowed, her tone filled with undisguised dissatisfaction: "Brother, you knew perfectly well she had ill intentions, so why did you agree to bring her along?"

Jiang Ren did not answer immediately.

He shifted the suit jacket from his arm to his other hand, remained silent for a few seconds, then turned to Su Qing, his tone earnest and solemn: "Su Qing, I apologize to you on her behalf for what happened earlier."

After saying that, he raised his hand and rubbed his temples. The gesture revealed a kind of weariness from being caught in the middle. "My mother's mental state has been getting worse and worse lately. My father was afraid that if Cui Jiayi stayed by her side, it would agitate her, so he completely cut off Cui Jiayi's path to the Jiang family."

"But...you all know my mom. She agreed verbally, but she still cares about our family ties. She agreed to let Cui Jiayi come this time because she wanted to see if she had really changed. I tried to persuade her, but it was no use."

He didn't say anything more, but everyone understood.

Cui Ying's illness was an unavoidable premise in all the decisions, and Cui Jiayi took advantage of this.

Jiang Yi thought about her aunt's condition over the years, and then about her impulsive question just now. Her lips moved, but she didn't say anything more.

Upon hearing this, Su Qing and Jiang Ran simultaneously recalled a scene from several years ago.

It was when Jiang Ran was in fifth grade. One day after school, she stood under the sycamore tree as usual, waiting, but saw that familiar black car parked at the school gate. The door opened, and Cui Ying got out.

That was their first and only close meeting in all these years.

At that time, Cui Ying was wearing a plain-colored long dress, and her hair was tied back with a simple hairpin. She looked gentle and quiet, but the way she looked at Jiang Ran was strange.

It wasn't the polite scrutiny of looking at a strange child, but rather a complex feeling, like looking at another person through Jiang Ran's eyes.

The system later told her that Cui Ying suffered from psychogenic post-traumatic stress disorder and that the pain of losing her daughter had never truly healed over the years.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In the side room, Cui Jiayi sat on a soft stool in front of the dressing table, wiping the cream off her hair with a wet wipe.

Her dress was covered in colorful juice stains and cream marks from shoulders to hem, her updo was mostly undone and stuck stickily to her cheeks, and there was a small piece of tiramisu cocoa powder stuck to her forehead.

When Uncle Wu pushed open the door, he was carrying a clean spare dress. He placed the dress on the low cabinet next to the dressing table, turned around, and looked at Cui Jiayi's face as she slowly wiped off her smudged mascara in the mirror. His tone was cold yet restrained: "Why did you provoke her? The little bit of goodwill you managed to regain with Madam is now completely ruined."

Cui Jiayi paused for a moment while wiping her face.

She looked up and saw the old butler standing straight behind her in the mirror, his hair white but meticulous. The fleeting, clown-like smile on Su Qing's lips flashed through her mind again.

She crumpled the wet wipe into a ball, her knuckles turning white from the force, but quickly relaxed it again. Listening to Butler Wu's words, a calm smile returned to her lips, her tone carrying a chilling composure: "Uncle Wu, it's not your place to teach me how to do things. You should be thinking about how to smooth things over for me. After all, if I can't stay in the Jiang family anymore, you, lying in the hospital, clinging to life with targeted therapy every month, probably won't last much longer either, don't you think?"

Uncle Wu didn't speak when he heard this, but the deep look in his eyes was impossible to hide. The light from the side room shone on his face, making the deep wrinkles on his forehead particularly clear.

His white-gloved hand hung at his side, his fingers slowly closing, the knuckles clenching into tiny wrinkles beneath the glove fabric.

After a moment, he spoke, his voice low, as if it were being ground out from the depths of his throat: "Don't go too far. If anything happens to me, you won't get away with it either."

  

Cui Jiayi adjusted her earrings in front of the mirror, her smile unchanged.

She knew Uncle Wu wouldn't dare.

This man has a lover lying in the hospital, or more precisely, his only living relative, a wife with a terminal illness who relies on exorbitant medical bills to stay alive each month.

Back then, it was Cui Jiayi who approached Wu, the housekeeper, when his wife's condition worsened and she was desperate.

Her offer was simple: help her get rid of her sister's newborn daughter, and she would cover all his medical expenses.

What she didn't know was that the conscientious housekeeper Wu did not kill the child as she ordered. Instead, she contacted a female doctor who was somewhat mentally unstable and sent the child to a welfare home far away from the northern part of the city.

When filling out the information, he wrote down a name he had overheard from his wife: Jiang Ran.

That was the name his wife gave their daughter; he remembered it very clearly.

He harbored selfish motives; he wanted the child to live, hoping that perhaps one day she could be found and see her biological parents again.

Later, the female doctor became completely mentally unstable and babbled incoherently in the interrogation room, saying things that no one could understand. The police found fragments of clothing and unidentifiable bone fragments, and the case was closed as "highly suggestive of victimization."

Everyone thought that the Jiang family's youngest daughter was dead. Cui Ying was heartbroken and almost went crazy. Uncle Wu kept this secret buried deep in his heart for more than ten years.

He knew what he had done was unforgivable, and he had considered confessing, but every time he saw his wife lying in the hospital bed with tubes inserted into her body, he swallowed his words.

Now that Cui Jiayi has cut off his medical expenses, it's tantamount to strangling his wife's lifeline, and at the same time, it puts his already meager conscience on the fire to be slowly roasted.

Cui Jiayi stood up from the dressing table and changed into the clean dress.

She walked up to Uncle Wu, raised her hand to straighten his bow tie, the movement was very light, like a gentle greeting, but her words were like a pair of rusty scissors: "Uncle Wu, I know what you're thinking."

"You feel sorry for them? You feel you shouldn't have helped me back then? But don't forget, you promised me that yourself. Now it's too late. Your half-dead wife is still lying in the hospital waiting for you to pay her bills every month. You're not thinking of stopping the payments, are you?"

She smiled slightly, patted his shoulder, and turned to walk towards the door.

She took two steps and then stopped, turning her head to the side. Her voice was light and airy, as if she were discussing tonight's dessert, "Clean up the outside. I'm going back now. Today has been such a bad day."

Uncle Wu stood alone under the light in the side hall, the shoulder that Cui Jiayi had patted slumped slightly.

He slowly removed his white gloves, revealing the crisscrossing veins and age spots on the back of his hands.

He looked down at his hands, the hands that had once held the Jiang family's newborn daughter and had once handed a basket containing a baby to that madwoman.

He wondered what would have happened if he hadn't been so blinded by greed, what would have happened if he had told his wife and husband...

Wouldn't this have prevented the current consequences...?