Chapter 1

When some local thugs were harassing me, my widowed sister-in-law accidentally injured one of them while trying to save me, and she was sentenced to two years in prison.

Fortunately, she was carrying my brother's posthumous child, so she could serve her sentence outside prison.

Out of guilt, I brought her home and cared for her diligently.

And I promised to raise the child with her afterward.

My fiancé, Aaron Rowe, had a lot to say about it:

"You brought this little empress into our house, fine, but why do you have to raise her kid too? Have you lost your mind?"

I looked at my sister-in-law, who was throwing up like the world was ending, and rebuked him coldly:

"If it weren't for her, I might have died that night! And what's more, she's carrying my brother's child!"

Later, the child was safely born, and my sister-in-law had to start serving her sentence.

I held my nephew and comforted her:

"I've got the baby covered. Just hang in there another ten months and you'll be out!"

Suddenly she pulled out a pregnancy test:

"No need to hang on. I'm pregnant again."

I couldn't help freezing:

"You're home every single day. Where did you get pregnant?"

She stroked her belly and slapped me across the face:

"Stop putting on an act. Didn't you tell Aaron to help me?"

I swallowed the blood filling my mouth, and it was a long while before I could speak:

"Help you with what?"

1

The moment I asked that, Serena's face went even redder than my swollen cheek.

She shook out her stinging hand and stared straight at me:

"Why are you asking for all these details? I know you meant well, that you didn't want me to go to prison, and you didn't want Maurice separated from me the moment he was born. I understand all of it!"

"Don't worry, I'll take this to my grave."

"If anyone asks, I'll just say I don't know who the father is! I'll never drag you or Aaron into it!"

"That slap just now, count it as one I gave you on your brother's behalf!"

The blood in my whole body kept surging upward because of those words.

I bit down hard on the soft flesh inside my mouth, and the sharp pain and the taste of blood told me I hadn't misheard.

And I hadn't misunderstood, either.

"So the child is Aaron's."

I said it as a statement.

Because Aaron really did dream of having a child...

Serena nodded.

The arms holding Maurice tightened without my meaning them to.

"Then this child can't be kept!"

My sister-in-law had always been good to me.

Since she'd brought this out into the open, surely she wouldn't want to keep the child either.

But she fell silent.

Her face was all smiles, yet the smiles didn't reach her eyes.

The way she looked at me held gratitude, held sympathy, and in the end turned into hatred.

"If I hadn't done it to save you, I wouldn't have gotten mixed up in any of this. Now it's already done, I don't have to go to prison, and you don't have to help me raise Maurice, but you're telling me to get rid of the baby!"

"Yolanda Sheldon, are you and your man playing games with me? All this suffering I've been through, wasn't it all for your sake in the end?"

Serena screamed the last sentence.

Her shrieking startled Maurice so badly that he burst into tears and wouldn't stop.

All I could do was hold Maurice and soothe him first.

As Serena watched me tend so carefully to the baby, a trace of guilt welled up on her face again.

"Yola, just now... I really didn't want to hit you, but you kept knowing full well and playing dumb... I couldn't take it and lost my temper, and with the postpartum depression on top of that..."

"Looking at Maurice, I keep thinking of your brother..."

Her tears came the instant she willed them.

As if she were still the same sister-in-law who loved my brother more than her own life.

But I didn't dare believe her anymore.

What did "for my sake" even mean?

Not wanting to go to prison — that was probably what she truly felt inside.

"What exactly did Aaron tell you? Why would you agree to something so absurd?"

Serena was stunned for a moment before she caught that something was off.

"Last month, when I got up to pump milk, your Aaron suddenly pushed the door open and said you didn't want me to go to prison, that if I could get pregnant again I wouldn't have to suffer in there."

"And you just believed that? You didn't check with me? You didn't refuse?"

My sarcasm made Serena drop her head, not daring to look at me.

She said in a low voice:

"I refused at the time, because I'd thought of that method too, finding some random man outside, but he said outsiders couldn't be trusted and it would ruin my reputation."

"You know I love your brother. Even after he was gone, I never thought of leaving this family..."

"Maurice is still so little, I couldn't bear to be parted from him..."

I looked at the child in my arms, my whole body trembling beyond my control.

If she loved my brother, she never should have slept with Aaron.

Much less waited until she was pregnant and couldn't hide it any longer to tell me.

I slept right next door with Maurice, and I'd wake the instant he made the slightest sound.

If Serena had felt even a shred of reluctance, one cry from her and I'd have known something was wrong and stopped it all.

But the truth was, I hadn't even realized these two had made a baby right under my nose.

Thinking back to those few days last month, when I drank the milk my sister-in-law heated for me and slept like the dead.

What was there left to not understand?

It was nothing but a scummy man and a shameless woman carrying on right under my nose.

Before I could speak, Serena, her eyes brimming with tears, demanded of me:

"So this wasn't your idea. Aaron lied to me behind your back."

I gritted my teeth and threw the question back at her word by word:

"Was it him lying to me, or the two of you together?"

Her tears fell at once like beads off a broken string.

"Yola, how could you think of me like that?"

She took Maurice from my arms, went back to her room alone, and locked the door from the inside.

She left me with one line:

"Aaron said you couldn't eat or sleep over this, that you felt you'd wronged me, so he told me not to bring it up with you."

I knew perfectly well she was trying to sow discord, to make Aaron and me fight.

But driven by fury, I still hailed a cab and rushed to Aaron's company.

The moment I saw him, I slapped him twice.