Chapter 25: Her Family

After ending the call, Jiang Sui looked down at Lu Xuanxuan, who had already fallen asleep nestled close to her, and gently stroked the little girl's head.

The chauffeur asked, "Miss Jiang, are we heading straight to Xihe Garden?"

"Yes," she replied.

Although everyone around Jiang Sui called her "Sister Jiang," she was actually quite young—only twenty-one this year. So it was perfectly reasonable for her to bring a goddaughter along to participate in the show; no one would object. But for people to suspect that Lu Xuanxuan was her own daughter was utterly absurd. How could she have possibly had a child at fifteen?

She sent another message to her lawyer, dealing with the termination of her contract with Tina. Fortunately, she wasn’t backed by a company or a team, so after parting ways with her agent, there were only a few loose ends to tie up.

In the original script, Jiang Sui only signed with a company after this variety show aired.

Once she finished contacting her lawyer, she drifted off to sleep beside Lu Xuanxuan. She didn’t wake until they arrived back at the villa.

After returning home, she asked the housekeeper to tidy up, then reapplied medicine to Lu Xuanxuan’s injuries and told her to go back to sleep.

Jiang Sui sprawled out on the living room couch, boldly starting to study the network of relationships and social ties attached to this body.

As she scrolled through the contacts and saw entries marked as "Mom" and a few with the surname Shen, she finally remembered.

Jiang Sui did have a mother, but when she was eleven, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried soon after.

From Jiang Sui’s childhood recollection, her parents had never gotten along very well. Her mother complained that her father was never home, and her father complained that work kept him too busy. Even when they were together, they barely communicated; the air was always heavy and tense.

But as a child, Jiang Sui hadn't understood any of this. All she knew was that their little family of three was no more. Upon seeing her mother remarry, she cast herself in the role of the abandoned daughter, and began to harbor resentment and distance toward her mother, feeling she’d been betrayed.

The two people with the surname Shen were her mother’s stepsons, both two or three years older than her.

Growing up in a single-parent home, with a father too busy to care for her, Jiang Sui had developed an unlikable, willful, and brash personality. She blamed the Shen brothers for stealing her mother away, so she deliberately got their contact information just to bombard them with messages.

Her actions only made already strained relationships even worse. The Shen brothers grew to truly dislike her, and contact between them became rare to nonexistent.

After the divorce, her mother had actually tried to visit Jiang Sui regularly. But one day, Jiang Sui saw her mother interacting warmly with the two brothers, and jealousy twisted into hatred for Lin Hui as well.

That happened to coincide with Jiang Sui’s rebellious adolescence, when she was prone to extremes and fixated on her grievances, making their relationship even more fraught. At the time, Jiang Sui spent a lot of time online, picking up all sorts of toxic notions, channeling every negative and hostile emotion she had onto Lin Hui, and frequently showing up at the Shen household to create chaos.

Eventually, her mother fell into depression, and contact between them dwindled further.

This state of affairs lasted well into Jiang Sui’s adulthood. By the time she realized how excessive some of her behavior had been, the damage was already irreparable. She could only let things remain as they were.

The original script scarcely mentioned Jiang Sui’s family, but it was clear that her difficult upbringing had shaped her personality, leaving her with significant flaws. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have tried to use Xuanxuan for attention on the show, or gone so far as to scold and hit her on camera...

She opened her last chat with her mother, which dated back a year, when she married Lu Ye.

Jiang Sui: "I’m getting married."

Lin Hui: "Who are you marrying?"

Jiang Sui: "Why do you care who I marry? I’m just letting you know. Who do you think you are to meddle in my business?"

Lin Hui: "I’m your mother."

Jiang Sui: "I don’t have a mother who’s so promiscuous and even likes being someone else’s stepmother! I have no mother!"

That was the end of their conversation. Lin Hui hadn’t replied after that.

Jiang Sui then opened her chats with the Shen brothers.

Good grief.

Her tirades were truly vicious—screen after screen of foul language and insults.

Neither brother had stooped to her level or retaliated; their restraint was almost disappointing. Eventually, when she tried to send more messages, all she got in return were exclamation marks.

She’d been blocked.

But even being blocked hadn’t dampened the original Jiang Sui’s enthusiasm for venting her anger; she kept sending exclamation marks, as if shouting into the void.

Jiang Sui pressed her fingers to her forehead.

If she remembered correctly, one brother ran a software company and moonlighted as a popular e-sports player. The other was in investment, more or less inheriting the Shen family’s assets.

The original script hadn’t focused much on the Shen family, probably because Jiang Sui’s later development had little to do with them.

Should she reach out to them?