"Later, I got pregnant, and his mother insisted that I was carrying a girl. She fed me leftovers every meal and wouldn't let me touch any meat. I cried to him, and he said, 'My mother has been through a lot, she knows a lot, and she's doing this for your own good.'"
“This time…this time she sold Nannan. I mentioned it to him, and guess what he said?” Liu Fen looked at Su Wantang, her eyes devoid of tears, only a silent, bottomless abyss.
He said, "My mother is only doing this for the good of the family. How much can you do with fifty yuan? Besides, it's a blessing for a little girl to be sent to a rich family in the city to be raised. It's better for her than to suffer with us. Don't be ungrateful and make my mother angry."
Su Wantang was struck dumb, frozen in place.
She had imagined countless possibilities: her husband was weak, he was blindly obedient to his parents, he was a peacemaker... but she never expected the answer to be like this.
That's not blind filial piety; it's a deep-seated conviction!
In that man's heart, his wife and his daughter combined were not as valuable as a single word from his mother, nor as valuable as fifty dollars.
Su Wantang felt a chill run from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. She had always thought that Liu Fen only had one enemy, her wicked mother-in-law. But now she realized that Liu Fen was facing an unbreakable cage built by the mother and son together.
Granny Li was the one who administered the punishment, and her husband was the one who personally handed her the whip and locked the prison door securely.
This is true despair.
There was nowhere to escape, and no one to rely on.
Looking at the emaciated woman before her, on the verge of a mental breakdown, Su Wantang felt a profound sense of powerlessness for the first time. She could cure her physical ailments, help her retrieve her sold child, and even get Zhao Jing to back her up temporarily.
But she couldn't save her life.
The root of Liu Fen's "illness" lay not in her body, but in her marriage, in the man she should have relied on. It was an unsolvable dead end.
The room fell into a deathly silence.
Looking at Liu Fen's empty eyes and listening to her heavy breathing due to the high fever, Su Wantang suddenly remembered the question she had just asked.
"Tang, tell me, what do I need to do to kill her?"
It turns out that when a person is driven to a dead end, when all hope has been lost, taking someone down with them becomes the only way she can think of to protect herself and her child.
This thought sent a chill down Su Wantang's spine. She knew that if she didn't find a solution soon, Liu Fen... would really be in trouble. And it would be a tragedy that would drag the entire family down with her.
Looking into Liu Fen's eyes, which were filled with despair, Su Wantang felt a pang of sorrow in her heart. She knew that no amount of reasoning would help at this moment; she could only approach the issue from the most practical angle.
"Sister-in-law, listen to me." Su Wantang's voice was soft, but carried an undeniable firmness. "You're wrong to think like this. You're going to kill her, and then what? You'll go to jail, what will happen to the child?"
Liu Fen's body trembled slightly, but she did not answer.
“Have you thought about how your daughter will live if you really do such a thing? What will people think of her? She will be labeled as the daughter of a murderer, and she will never be able to get rid of that label for the rest of her life.”
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