Chapter 90: A Cruel Fate

The manager cried for three or four minutes. Then she wiped away her tears with her sleeve and looked at Jiang Fan.

“Can you tell I’ve been crying?”

Seeing that even in the midst of her release she still cared about how others saw her, Jiang Fan only shook his head and said nothing.

After she had composed herself, Manager Liu, now calm again, began to tell him about her past.

She had two names. The name she used now, Xingyu, was not her parents’ surname, but that of her aunt’s husband.

She came from Xiangtan in Hunan. When she was just over a year old, both her parents died in a car accident. She had an older brother and an older sister; the three children were taken in by different relatives. She herself was raised by her mother’s youngest sister, who had not yet married.

There was beauty in the family line. Her little aunt was famous as a rare beauty in ten villages and eight hamlets, and she treated Xingyu well. When she married, she made no demands at all, only insisting that the child come with her.

Even Xingyu’s name was changed, taking her aunt’s husband’s surname and becoming Liu Xingyu.

At first her uncle by marriage treated her well too, but later her little aunt gave birth one after another to four younger siblings, the burden on the household grew heavier, and his attitude toward her slowly changed.

Her aunt felt sorry for her and did all she could to protect her, but in the countryside the man ruled the household, and a village woman’s words carried little weight at home.

As the years of hard labor wore on, the little aunt’s beauty faded, and Xingyu’s misery multiplied along with it.

When she was in second grade, her uncle by marriage demanded that she drop out of school and stay home to care for the younger children. Only when her aunt threatened to die rather than allow it did he finally agree to let her continue her studies.

Knowing how hard-won her education was, she remained first in her class from elementary school through middle school. Once, when she slipped to second place on a test, she ran to her biological parents’ graves and wept bitterly before she could ease the pressure in her heart.

Her uncle by marriage was lazy and gluttonous. Relying on his looks and a silver tongue, he liked to chase after women in the surrounding villages.

When Xingyu was in middle school, he took up with a young widow from the village, and war in the household became a daily thing.

With a new flame in his arms, he not only beat her aunt often, but also vented his anger on Xingyu whenever it suited him.

Raised from childhood to read her uncle’s face before she breathed, Xingyu grew up with deep inferiority and timidity. Whatever she did, she was careful to the point of caution. When she got home, if there was work, she would rush to do it; if there was none, she would instinctively seize a broom and sweep the house again and again, only so her uncle could see that she was working.

At fifteen, she entered the county high school with the best score in the entire school. Her uncle by marriage once again demanded that she drop out and help the family earn work points and supplement the household.

To protect her, her little aunt swallowed her pride and agreed to ignore his affair with the widow in exchange for allowing Xingyu to continue her education.

She studied only half a year in high school before disaster struck from nowhere. While carrying water, her aunt accidentally fell and broke her right leg. The uncle, whose heart had long since turned elsewhere, refused to borrow money for her treatment. In the end she was left disabled and could no longer work.

With the aunt, the household’s main pillar, taken down, the family could no longer even make ends meet, and Xingyu had no choice but to drop out and return home to farm.

How could such a pair of immature shoulders bear the weight of an entire family? Her lazy uncle then set his sights on her.

Using the pretense of taking her to the market in the town, he deceived her aunt and even lied to Xingyu, saying someone was taking her out to earn money. He personally handed her over to traffickers, and in the end she was sold to the man who is now her husband. That year, she was not yet seventeen.

When she arrived at her husband’s family, in an even more remote and impoverished place, she had thought she might at last live a quiet life. She had not expected that her husband was bought with borrowed money, and that he was just like her uncle by marriage: lazy and good for nothing. Other than coming home at night, he was nowhere to be seen by day. The household depended entirely on her parents-in-law and herself to raise one younger brother-in-law and three younger sisters-in-law.

She accepted her fate. After giving birth to two children, the burden became even heavier. Only when her husband’s family saw that life there was truly impossible did they agree to let her follow fellow villagers out to work.

Even the fare for leaving home had been earned by spending half a night entangled with an old bachelor from the same village.

It was because of all these things that when she saw Gou Biao and so many others beating her husband, she remained unmoved.

Having endured the suffering of two families, Xingyu longed deeply for a quiet life. Even if Gou Biao humiliated her, she was willing to follow him of her own accord.

Her marriage to her husband had been a purchased one, and even now they had never obtained a marriage certificate.

Not long after she and Gou Biao got together, he urged her to separate from her husband, while he himself would go home and divorce, so that the two of them could stay together for the long term.

Xingyu thought he treated her fairly well and even promised him as much. Yet two months after they became involved, she discovered that Gou Biao had someone else besides her.

After that, her heart went dead. Still, she acted as though nothing had happened, neither crying nor making a scene, and continued entangled with him, all for the sake of her job and out of fear that if she lost it, she would have no place left to land.

Having cried once already, Xingyu’s face showed little change as she spoke of her rough road through life.

But Jiang Fan felt his eyes well with tears. “Have you never thought about your future?”

Xingyu shook her head. “Take one day as it comes. As long as I can live in peace like this, I’m already very satisfied. If I must speak of plans, I only want to save some money. If I get the chance, I want to go see my little aunt. It’s been seven or eight years since I last saw her. With an uncle like that, I can’t even imagine what sort of life she’s living now.”

Seeing that her expression remained blank, the result of utter despair in her heart, Jiang Fan changed the subject. “You don’t hate me for what happened before?”

Xingyu still shook her head and said honestly, “What right do I have to hate for things I myself did? When I saw the day before yesterday that you were about to leave the factory, I both hoped you would leave quickly and hoped you would stay.”

“You wanted me to stay?”

Though he sympathized with her, Jiang Fan still did not quite believe it when she said she hoped he would remain.

Seeing the doubt in his eyes, Xingyu explained, “I wanted you to leave quickly because of your nature. You would certainly interfere in some of the factory’s unspeakable affairs, and some of those things are tied to me. That would definitely threaten my position, so I wanted you gone at once.

“As for wanting you to stay, there was still a little humanity in me that had not yet been worn away. With you here, those people around the boss who bully others with their power would restrain themselves a little. And from the bottom of my heart, I also hoped that someone righteous like you would stay. In short, my feelings were very complicated.

“When I saw you return to the factory, I was uneasy all afternoon, and in the end I still gathered my courage and came to find you.”

Jiang Fan, who had also grown up in hardship, understood the inferiority and timidity in Xingyu’s heart, and how they had made her practical and realistic.

Her frank words moved him somewhat, and he replied with equal honesty, “I know you told me your story because you were afraid that when I took revenge on Gou Biao, I would drag you into it as well. If this had been before, I might not have had the patience to listen to all this, and I wouldn’t have sympathized.

“When I passed the personnel office just now and saw you chatting warmly with Shen Tingting, my impression of you changed a little.

“Since you don’t want to tell me what you and Gou Biao did together, I won’t press you.

“But I can tell you this: when I return to the factory, I definitely won’t spare that bastard Gou. If the matter truly involves you then, I’ll do everything I can to protect your job. If I really can’t manage it, don’t blame me.

“I can’t promise you anything else. If you lose your job because of the feud between me and that bastard, I can promise to find you another factory. But it certainly won’t be a position as good as the one you have now.”