Chapter 20: Orphan Girl
The two daughters-in-law didn’t dare disagree. Though their hearts were filled with contempt, Old Mrs. Bai’s method was quite clever. As the head of the Bai Family, she had the food divided up per person, and the best portion would always, naturally, go to her.
Doctor Lu found the wooden hut where Zhao Lan and Bai Zhi lived. Seeing the mother and daughter huddled together on the straw pile, he couldn’t help but heave a long sigh. He turned to Bai Zhi and said, "Sigh... you and your mother have truly had a bitter lot in life. To have ended up in a family like this... I’m afraid a single lifetime isn’t enough for them to torment you."
Bai Zhi smiled. "Not anymore. From now on, I will protect my mother. No one will ever bully her again."
Doctor Lu looked at the thin, frail girl before him. A faint smile graced her bruised face, and her eyes were slightly narrowed. Flickers of bright intelligence danced within them, dazzling him.
He had never properly looked at Bai Zhi before and hadn’t realized she had such beautiful eyes. They shone with wisdom and liveliness, and they were so crystal clear that one couldn’t help but feel a sense of trust toward their owner.
"Good. With words like that from you, your mother’s injuries will heal even faster." Doctor Lu was pleased. He placed the medicine packet into Bai Zhi’s hands. "Zhi, what I said before about your mother being gravely injured—I did that on purpose to scare them. Don’t you worry. Your mother has no internal injuries. Aside from her arm, it’s all just superficial wounds. She’ll be fine after a period of rest, there’s nothing to be seriously concerned about."
"Then this medicine?" She knew her mother only had superficial wounds, so she was curious what kind of medicine Doctor Lu would prescribe. ’Superficial wounds don’t require oral medication. A topical ointment to reduce the bruising should be enough.’
Doctor Lu smiled. "I brought you two some nourishing tonic. Both you and your mother can drink it. Your life in the Bai Family must be difficult. Look how thin you’ve become. At your age, you need to nourish your body properly, or else it’ll be difficult to find a husband’s family later on."
Tears streamed down Zhao Lan’s face when she heard this. "Isn’t that the truth? Girls Zhi’er’s age—which one of them isn’t raised on an egg a day to keep their bodies healthy, so it’s easier to bear children after they’re married? But my Zhi’er... she doesn’t even know what an egg tastes like. It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault for being such a useless mother."
Seeing her start to cry, Doctor Lu quickly tried to console her. "You can’t say things like that. Everyone in Huangtuo Village sees perfectly well how you treat Zhi. If it weren’t for her, why would you have stayed in the Bai Family all these years to suffer such abuse?" When the third son passed away, she was still young; it would have been very easy for her to remarry. But for Zhi’s sake, she stubbornly sent her own family packing when they came to take her to be remarried, and instead stayed with Zhi in the Bai Family, working like a horse and ox for a full decade.
Although Zhi was taken in, she still had the Bai surname. If Zhao Lan were to remarry, she wouldn’t be able to take Zhi with her. Besides, Old Mrs. Bai had long wanted to sell Zhi off as a child bride for some money; she would never have let Zhao Lan take her.
Bai Zhi thought again of her father and mother from her previous life. They clearly had the means to raise her, but neither of them had wanted her. They had abandoned their four-year-old daughter on a street bustling with traffic. At the time, she hadn’t known her parents didn’t want her anymore. She had sat obediently by the side of the road, waiting for them to come back and pick her up, until the police took her to the station. They asked for her parents’ names. She remembered her mother’s cell phone number. When the police called, they put it on speaker. She heard it with her own ears—her mother saying she hadn’t lost a child, that she didn’t have a child at all.