Chapter 1

Elisa Fox once believed that caring for the elderly was a duty as natural as breathing—until she brought her eighty-three-year-old grandmother home to live with her, and finally saw the full abyss of human nature.

Her four successful uncles ignored their own mother entirely, while Elisa's family took Grandma in out of soft-heartedness, thinking they were doing right by her. Yet in just twenty-six short days, they were driven to the brink of ruin, their family torn apart.

There is a kind of old woman whose viciousness never shows on the surface. She never throws tantrums or rolls on the floor, and she never once cries poor—but with needle-in-cotton faultfinding, endless psychological suggestion, and comparisons conjured out of nothing, she can bleed away every ounce of your energy and wealth, like slicing off flesh with a soft knife.

When Elisa's mother, worn down until her mind was slipping, made that fatal phone call, Elisa suddenly realized what scalp-crawling truth lay behind her four uncles' cold-blooded severing of ties all those years ago...

Elisa Fox is thirty years old this year, and works as a senior operations director at an internet company in Metro City.

Life in this city moves at a furious pace, and the morning rush hour is like a war fought without smoke every single day, but Elisa had always felt she was a person with a solid core of confidence.

That confidence came from her family—not wealthy, but full of warmth and a strong moral sense.

Elisa's mother was named Ida Whitney, the youngest of five children and the only daughter. Above Ida were four older brothers—Elisa's four uncles.

By all logic, in a traditional family with four sons, an elderly parent's later years should have been spent surrounded by children and grandchildren, cared for in peace and comfort.

What's more, all four of these uncles were doing quite well.

Uncle Warren went into business early and owned two large apartments in the state capital; Uncle Nathan was a mid-level manager in a government institution, with a wide network of connections; the third brother was a contractor, reportedly turning over several hundred thousand dollars a year; Uncle Adrian was more ordinary, but he ran two chain supermarkets in the hometown city center and lived comfortably.

And yet reality was like a resounding slap across the face of this seemingly glamorous family.

Not one of these four well-off uncles was willing to take care of their eighty-three-year-old mother.

Ever since Elisa's grandfather passed away ten years ago, the question of who would care for Grandma had become a ticking time bomb no one wanted to touch.

At first, the four uncles still made a show of taking turns having Grandma stay with them for a few months at a time, but at some point this rotation came to an abrupt stop.

Uncle Warren used the excuse that business kept him too busy and that he was often traveling abroad. Uncle Nathan said his son's wife had just had a second child and there was no room at home. The third and fourth brothers were even more blunt—they changed their phone numbers, and only during New Year's would they send the younger ones over with two boxes of some token supplements to look in for a moment, staying less than half an hour before finding an excuse to leave.

In the end, this hot potato landed squarely in the hands of the youngest daughter, Ida.

Ida was an extremely traditional, soft-hearted woman. One thing she often said was, "That's the mother who gave birth to me and raised me. If my brothers won't care for her, I can't just watch her end up on the streets."

For that one promise, Ida paid an unimaginable price.

She was only an ordinary retired worker, with a monthly pension of little more than three thousand dollars, and Elisa's father was an honest, plain-living high school teacher.

To care for Grandma, Ida not only poured in her own pension but also often took odd jobs behind Claude's back to help make ends meet. Grandma had high blood pressure and diabetes, and the monthly medication bills alone were no small expense.

What tore at Elisa's heart most was that winter two years ago. The north was bitterly cold, and Grandma ignored everyone's warnings and insisted on going down herself to buy some old-fashioned pastries—only to take a hard fall on the icy pavement, shattering her femoral head.

The doctor said that for an eighty-one-year-old to undergo such major surgery carried an extremely high risk, and that recovery afterward would demand enormous energy and money.

During that stretch, Ida was as frantic as an ant on a hot pan.

She called her four brothers one by one to borrow money. Uncle Warren's phone was answered by his secretary, who said, "Mr. Whitney is in a meeting." Uncle Nathan did pick up, but spoke in an official, bureaucratic tone: "Ida, money's tight for me lately too. Things are being scrutinized hard in the government right now—cover it yourself for now, and we'll talk later." The third and fourth brothers simply played dead and never answered her messages.

In the end, Ida gritted her teeth and pulled out a small portion of the money the family had set aside for Elisa's down payment on a home in Metro City, and used it to pay Grandma's surgery bill.

In the two months after the surgery, Ida lost a full fifteen pounds.

She stayed at the hospital alone, never even changing out of her clothes to rest—during the day handling the bedpan, turning Grandma over, washing her, and at night curling up on the narrow cot under the hospital bed, scrambling up at the slightest sound.

From the long stretch of poor rest, Ida's hair fell out in clumps, and she even fainted twice in the hospital corridor.

Meanwhile, those four strong, wealthy, powerful sons, over those two whole months, sent only two grandchildren as stand-ins, who brought a few baskets of fruit, made a token appearance in the ward, and left in a hurry without so much as glancing at the medical bills.

Looking at Grandma sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed, and her mother beside her, face gaunt and worn with exhaustion, Elisa felt a seed of bitter loathing for her four uncles take root in her heart. She wondered: how could there be such cold-blooded, selfish ingrates in this world?