Chapter 264
Chapter 264: You Cannot Wake Someone Pretending to Sleep
Most importantly, he does not think there is anything hard about his old mother living in a storage room. The storage room of a rich family is much bigger than the shabby little apartment where the four of them squeezed together before.
Since his mother could suffer so much in order to raise him into a success, then suffering a bit more now for the sake of his future and career is no big deal, right?
This way of thinking sounds ridiculous, but some people can convince themselves with this kind of twisted logic and feel completely at ease about it. That has a lot to do with what their parents taught them from a young age. You can only say that for this bitter fruit, Madam Kou herself contributed a lot.
“As for your third son, there is even less to say. It is true that because your eldest son lent money, he managed to get into college smoothly and later found a relatively decent job after graduation. But before he even entered society, he already owed a large debt, and that debt came from his own family. Your third son could not accept that at all. Because of it, he started hating the brother who refused to sponsor him for free, and he hated you even more for staying silent the whole time.”
“In his eyes, your silence was ironclad proof that, between these two sons, you favored his brother more. Back when his brother went to college, the tuition was paid with the hard-earned blood and sweat money his second brother made doing labor. How come he never saw his brother pay that money back to the second brother? Yet when it was his turn, he not only had to pay it back, he had to pay interest on top. How could you be so double-sided?”
As the saying goes, people do not worry about having little, they worry about unfairness. The third son could not see the suffering his second brother and fourth sister went through. All he cared about was comparing himself to his eldest brother. He felt that Madam Kou treated him worse than she treated his brother, so his heart filled with dissatisfaction and resentment. He forgot all the good she had done for him over the years and held onto that one grievance.
“Do you think your third son only started resenting you because he was egged on by his wife? That he began to dislike you more and more, and deliberately made you live in a doghouse and eat scraps?”
“He actually made his own biological mother live in a doghouse?” Before anyone else could react, the Auntie who had somehow ended up next to Du An Rao gasped and cried out.
Madam Kou’s expression changed slightly, but she still stiffened her neck and said: “That is right. My children have always been clever, kind, and sensible since they were little. If it were not for those sluts stirring things up, how could they treat me like this?”
So now even the eldest son’s cold indifference and selfish calculation were being blamed on the eldest daughter-in-law?
Everyone was speechless. They really felt this woman was beyond saving.
“Well, you are going to be disappointed. Your third daughter-in-law has nothing much against you. At most, she just does not think much of you. Making you live in a doghouse, abusing and humiliating you, that was completely your third son’s own idea. She was only taking the blame for him.”
“That is impossible! I do not believe it!” Madam Kou finally lost control and shrieked, glaring at Du An Rao as if she wanted to tear her apart.
Auntie in Yellow had known her for some time. Otherwise, she would not have been chatting with her and Madam Shen just now. Seeing this side of her that was so different from the one she usually showed, Auntie’s heart gave a jolt, and she secretly sighed that her husband had been right.
Other than that one time she did not know what possessed her to choose her husband on a blind date, her eye for people had never been right.
“You are talking nonsense. My sons would never treat me like that. They only turned out this way because they were misled by those sluts. Once they wake up, they will definitely go back to being the good children they used to be. Everything you are saying is fake, it is all fake.”
You really can never wake someone who is pretending to sleep. More importantly, this person did not seem worth waking up.
After hearing about the situation in the Kou family, Mother Du only felt that Madam Kou’s eldest and third sons were both ungrateful white-eyed wolves. On the other hand, the second son and the fourth daughter, as the oppressed, drained sacrifices, were less affected by Madam Kou’s own rotten nature. They might actually be good people.
As they had just mentioned, the fourth daughter escaped from that man-eating home and had already built a good life of her own.
After she settled down, she only kept in touch with the second brother who had once reached out a helping hand to her and who, like her, was also a victim.
“And her second son… how is he now?”
“Her second son…” Du An Rao instinctively glanced at Madam Kou.
A trace of panic flashed across Madam Kou’s face, but it was quickly replaced by hatred. “Do not mention that unfilial bastard. I do not have a son as selfish and unfilial as him.”
It would have been better if she had kept quiet. The moment she opened her mouth, she hooked everyone’s curiosity even more.
After all, she had never thought her sons were unfilial even when they coldly watched and deliberately made her work as a nanny and servant, living in a storage room or a doghouse. In fact, she defended them all the time.
This second son, from what Du An Rao had just described, had at least been decent enough to save his sister from being sold to a piece of trash, helping her escape that wretched original family. Just on character alone, he was clearly better than the other two sons.
So how had he become a selfish, unfilial bastard in this woman’s mouth?
Had he really done something terrible, or was there more to the story?
“Selfish? Unfilial?” The look in Du An Rao’s eyes turned colder as she stared at Madam Kou and sneered. “What more did you want from him? For him to give you his very life?”
This second son of Madam Kou, like her fourth daughter, was one of the downtrodden at the bottom of this family, even more pitiful than his fourth sister.
As the second son, he had a clever, capable eldest brother above him and a sweet-tongued, doted-on youngest brother below. In this family, he had always been as invisible as air.
Good things never came to him, but bad things never missed him.
Back when his eldest brother was going to college, in order to raise the tuition, the second son was forced to drop out of school and work all kinds of hard labor jobs. That alone left him with a body full of old injuries.
Later, when the third son was about to go to college, Madam Kou came up with that vicious plan to sell her daughter. This honest man, who had been cowardly for half his life, finally gathered his courage once, and secretly helped his sister run away.
When his family found out what he had done, of course the second son suffered a vicious beating from his mother and was showered with curses and resentment from his eldest brother.
But by then it was already too late to make him go out and earn money again for his eldest brother’s tuition.
That gave the eldest son the chance to step in, lend money, and charge interest. Yet as the “culprit” who had ruined their grand plan, the second son was not as lucky as his sister. He did not get to escape that rotten home. Instead, he fell into an even more desperate whirlpool.
The money for the third son’s college tuition was borrowed by Madam Kou from the eldest son. The full amount was spent by the third son, but in the end, they forced the second son to pay it back in full.
They dressed it up with a nice excuse: if the second son had not let his sister escape, they would never have needed to borrow that money. So the second son had to take responsibility and help the third son repay the debt. If he refused, then he was unfilial and unbrotherly, unworthy of being human.
Everyone: “…”
This kind of terrifying PUA-style moral blackmail sent chills down their spines.