Chapter 2

Edwina went quiet for a moment, then let out a sigh.

"Yes!"

"You know how coddled my mother is. My dad treats her like a treasure. She can't take even the smallest bit of hardship."

"If I let Dominic prank her, can you imagine? My dad would tear me apart."

"Your mom's different. She lives out in the country. She's been through everything. She can hold out just fine till the game's over."

"And you're always calling to whine, aren't you? Country people don't fuss over things or get pampered like that."

She chatted with me while rocking Dominic's dog to sleep, even singing in the gentlest voice she had.

Hearing that, I felt the anger rise in me.

"What do you mean your mother's too coddled to take any hardship, and my mother's just a country woman so she isn't so delicate? That's blatant favoritism!"

"Enough!"

She screamed at me.

"You were a country nobody. I'm a city heiress, and I didn't hold your background against you. Marrying into your Dickerson family was already the best luck your family ever had."

"Doing one little thing for me isn't asking too much!"

From upstairs came my mother-in-law's furious shriek: "Get away from me, all of you! You put another cockroach in here and I'll have my husband make sure none of you get away with it!"

I was getting frantic. It wasn't my own mother being pranked, but she was still my mother-in-law.

I said to Edwina right away, "You'd better call them and make them stop. Pranking her like this isn't right."

"They actually dumped slop all over her, then waited till she went in to shower and put cockroaches in there…" But Edwina didn't seem to hear a word I said, still singing softly to lull the dog to sleep.

The moment my tone hardened, she laid into me.

"You're deafening me!"

Beyond impatient, she snapped, "Since when is some country hag that delicate? Hasn't she fed pigs and chickens? Doesn't that reek too?"

"What's there to be mad about over one little prank? I'm letting them go all out, so I can set the tone in your Dickerson family too."

Her words filled me with a cold, hollow desolation.

Everything she'd said came down to one thing. She looked down on us for being country people, and she didn't care about my mother's dignity at all.

But the Harding family's business.

So much of it ran on the big orders I brought back for them, and the partnerships I pushed through with one company after another.

Even after everything I'd done for her, following her every lead, she still looked down on my mother.

If that was how it was, then let's just get divorced.

"Edwina, do you even know who it is they're pranking?"

"That's your mother…"

"Shut up. There's no way it's my mother."

"She's lying in bed with a face mask on, enjoying herself right now!"

With that, afraid of waking Dominic's dog again, she hung up in a hurry.

So this was her babysitting Dominic's dog so he'd have the time to prank her mother to his heart's content?

I couldn't help wondering how she'd treat Dominic once she found out the one being pranked was her own mother.

Just then I heard the sound of someone falling, followed by Dominic and the others laughing.

"Ha, look at her, the way she's sprawled out. Doesn't she look just like a dog?"

"Tch, she's sprawling like that on purpose."

"She knows we've got a lot of good-looking guys around here, so she does it on purpose. Doesn't even look at her own age. Makes me sick just looking."

"Toss a rat in there, get her up."

"Ha, you guys are wicked!"

My mother-in-law's forehead was scraped raw, her body wrapped tight in a small, pitiful towel.

"You animals, get out of here now—"

"Aaah! A rat! A rat!"

"Hahaha, look, see? She scrambled right up!"

My mother-in-law's face flushed with rage as she glared at the crowd in front of her, furious and mortified, probably the first time in her life anyone had ever treated her like this.

I rushed up to the second floor, and even from a distance I saw a crowd gathered around the bathroom.

The door was clear glass. I could see my mother-in-law inside, huddled in on herself.

"Mom!"