Chapter 246: Whether Loved or Not, It’s Obvious
Everyone in the room fell silent. They had assumed this was just a sordid drama about a cheating scumbag—two-timing his wife, having a child with his mistress, and betraying the woman he married. They never imagined there were so many twists and turns to the story.
For a moment, none of them could figure out who was right and who was wrong. No wonder Mr. Lewis had called the matter disgraceful. If it were them, they would probably be even more reluctant to bring it up.
However, since Mr. Lewis’s younger brother was still alive, it meant his father’s girlfriend hadn’t aborted the child as Mr. Lewis’s grandparents had demanded. Instead, she had safely given birth to him.
"I remember you telling me that you and your younger brother grew up together. If you weren’t born to the same mother, why did you live together?"
By the time Ms. Cain met her husband, her mother-in-law had been dead for a long time, so they had never lived under the same roof.
But based on her husband’s occasional descriptions over the years and how he’d just spoken of her when recounting the past, Ms. Cain didn’t think her mother-in-law had the kind of disposition to magnanimously accept the child of an enemy and let him grow up harmoniously with her own son.
Hearing his wife ask this, the expression on Mr. Lewis’s face grew even more awkward.
"That’s because my younger brother’s birth mother unfortunately hemorrhaged while giving birth to him and passed away. My dad brought him home and lied to my mom, telling her she’d given birth to twins."
"...Your mom couldn’t even tell if she was pregnant with one baby or two?"
"Prenatal care wasn’t as thorough back then as it is now." Many people didn’t even get checkups. Whether a child was born healthy was a total gamble, and the same went for whether you were having one baby or two.
Not to mention, Mr. Lewis’s mother gave birth at home back then. She never even went to a hospital, so naturally, she believed whatever the man sleeping next to her said.
She probably never expected her own husband to be so heartless that he would even think of passing off his mistress’s child as her own.
"So when did you find out that you and your brother didn’t actually have the same mother?"
"When my mom was about to die from her illness."
Mr. Lewis still remembered it to this day. He was only thirteen or fourteen at the time, still in middle school. His mother was in the old family home, deathly ill, and he had gone back to see her during a school break, only to overhear her arguing with his father.
In Mr. Lewis’s memory, his father was rarely home growing up, and his mother was always neurotic and completely ignored household matters. He and his brother were both raised by their grandparents.
Moreover, whenever his father did come home, he was extremely cold toward him. Even if he and his brother stood before him together, his father would only look at his brother, smile only at his brother, and only hold his brother to play. He completely ignored him, the older son, and wouldn’t even spare him a few words.
Mr. Lewis never understood why. They were both his sons, yet his attitude toward them was a world apart. Until that day...
"I had never seen my dad so furious and out of control, nor had I ever seen my mom so hysterical. My dad purposely chose to tell her while she was sick just to spite her. He couldn’t wait for her to die so he could be free."
"My dad said that when his girlfriend was dying after giving birth to my brother, he stayed by her side. He listened as she told him how much she hated my mother, and how much she hated my grandparents. He watched as she was tormented by this hatred until her last breath, struggling, unable to close her eyes. He said his heart was breaking."
"But in reality, the person she hated most was my dad. Because if he hadn’t betrayed their relationship and slept with my mother, and if he hadn’t then cowardly chosen to obey his family’s arrangements and marry my mother, she wouldn’t have gone from being the rightful partner to the mistress. She wouldn’t have had to suffer humiliation and accusations from my grandparents while pregnant with their child, and she wouldn’t have been trapped in such an unbearable, awkward position."
The others in the private room were silent. They had to admit, the girlfriend had a clear head on her shoulders. While blaming Mr. Lewis’s grandparents and his mother, she didn’t forget to include Mr. Lewis’s father—the main culprit. Her motto seemed to be: a family should stick together, even in blame!
"After that, my dad lost his mind. He became obsessed with getting revenge—on my mother, on my grandparents, on everyone in the family except for my brother. And bringing my brother home, lying that we were twins, and making my mother and grandparents raise his and his girlfriend’s son for him... that was the first step of his revenge against this family."
Ms. Cain couldn’t help but lean over and take her husband’s cold hand, offering silent comfort.
Mr. Lewis gave a faint smile. After so many years, it didn’t really bother him anymore.
Even back then, it was more of a rude awakening, a sudden realization that even though they were both sons, there was a difference.
Loved or not loved—the difference was glaringly obvious.
Listening to Mr. Lewis’s story, Arabella Donovan found herself thinking what a curse it was to be so hopelessly in love. ’There are plenty of fish in the sea,’ she thought. ’Why on earth would you fight over a man whose heart already belongs to someone else? You could ruin your own life, harm the next generation... what for?’
’What a messy, clichéd love story. He loves her, she loves him, but then there’s the other she... and then everyone starts hating everyone else. The relationships are more tangled than a knotted ball of yarn. No wonder it caused something as awful as having their fates swapped.’
Caspian Rhodes: "..." He had to agree. Just listening to a certain someone’s summary made his own brain feel like it was tying itself in knots.
"So just because you two are half-brothers, you suspect it was your own brother who swapped your fates?"
"Of course, it’s not just because of that." Mr. Lewis pressed his lips together, then turned to his wife. "I can’t explain it exactly, it’s just a gut feeling. Do you remember when we first got married? My younger brother was still a total punk back then. Then, for a while, he suddenly changed for the better..."
Ms. Cain froze. Now that her husband mentioned it, she’d almost forgotten. When they first got married, her brother-in-law really wasn’t reliable. He was like a total loafer, constantly coming to her husband for money to go out and have fun. He never thought about finding a stable job and just stayed at home, waiting for his older brother to support him.
At the time, Ms. Cain hadn’t really understood her husband’s actions. She felt that her brother-in-law was about the same age, perfectly able-bodied, yet he wasn’t thinking about supporting himself and was still hitting up his married brother for money every day. It was truly unreasonable.
But they were blood relatives, after all, and to avoid conflict in her marriage, she couldn’t bring herself to voice her dissatisfaction, even though she felt it.
Unexpectedly, not long after, her brother-in-law seemed to become a different person. Not only did he find a job, but his personality changed too. He became mature and humorous. And though he still asked her husband for money from time to time, he was somehow much more likable when he did.
Soon after that, he quickly found a girlfriend, got married, and had children—two in three years. He had actually managed to have both a son and a daughter even before she and her husband did.
Ms. Cain thought back to the timing of her brother-in-law’s personality change. It seemed to be right around the time she had gotten pregnant with her first child.
And when she thought about when he got married, and especially when her sister-in-law got pregnant with their first child, it seemed... it was right after she had her miscarriage and lost her own baby!