Chapter 73: Mother Has Finally Returned
Chen Mo’s words stirred Su Yuqing’s heart. Teardrops clung to her eyelashes as she swallowed back a sob.
She suddenly grew bold, grabbing Chen Mo’s wrist right in front of her mother. She followed behind him, ready to leave.
Li Mingyu’s door opened a tiny crack. The sound of his mother smashing the lucky cat had told him there was a fight outside.
But he was too young to understand what was happening and didn’t dare to come out or say anything.
"Ungrateful wretch! Just like that bastard father of yours. No matter how well I treat you, you’re still cruel and heartless. Leaving just like that, without so much as a word!"
"Ungrateful wretches! That’s what you all are!"
"Go on, then! All of you, just go! I can live without you!"
"You’re all ungrateful wretches!" Li Fengzhi seemed to be cursing Su Yuqing, yet it was as if she was also muttering to herself, repeating the phrases again and again.
Her gaunt back slammed against the faded wallpaper. Her daughter’s blurry silhouette was reflected in her vacant pupils. Her lips twitched neurotically as she repeated the words, "ungrateful wretch." With each repetition, she tore out a strand of salt-and-pepper hair.
Su Yuqing saw her mother slowly slide to the floor. Her heart trembled, and the step she was taking faltered.
Seeing Su Yuqing pause, Li Fengzhi immediately looked at her, a flicker of hope in her eyes. "Yuqing," she pleaded, "when you were six, you were hospitalized with pneumonia... I stayed by your side for three days and three nights without closing my eyes... But your father? He was off in the Maldives, diving with his new flame! His phone was full of pictures he took of that homewrecker!"
Her hoarse voice was like rusty metal scraping against glass. She looked at Su Yuqing, trembling. "Was I not good to you? Why are you leaving? Why won’t you even say a word to Mom before you go?"
Looking at her mother’s haggard face, which seemed to have aged decades in an instant, Su Yuqing couldn’t stop her tears. Still, she fought back the urge to stay, looked at her mother, and said, "Mom... goodbye. Everything I wanted to say is in the note on the dining table..."
With that, she grabbed her suitcase and rushed out the door.
She was afraid that if she stayed even a moment longer, she might lose her resolve to leave.
The setting sun, filtering through the gauze curtains, cast lines of light and shadow across Li Fengzhi’s face. She spotted a light blue silk scarf peeking out from a gap in her daughter’s suitcase—one they had picked out together for Su Yuqing’s twelfth birthday.
Memories suddenly came flooding back. She remembered the warm bundle she held for the first time in the delivery room. She remembered the night of the divorce, her daughter clutching the hem of her clothes, begging, "Mommy, don’t leave me." She remembered how Su Yuqing always tried her best to show her a cute, happy smile.
Li Fengzhi stood up, dazed. She suddenly staggered toward the dining table, her fingertips trembling as she reached for the note her daughter had left.
On the page torn from a notebook, written in elegant script, were Su Yuqing’s words, full of gratitude and love. There wasn’t a single word of resentment or blame. In fact, at the end, she had even expressed her concern.
...Mom, remember to take your Deanxit on time. Don’t just leave the medicine anywhere. Remember to put it on the second shelf of the TV stand. You’ll see it when you grab the remote to watch TV, so you won’t forget to take it...
Suddenly, Li Fengzhi shuddered, and her entire expression seemed to change.
The motion-activated lights in the hallway lit up one by one with the sound of the door closing. The security door sliced Su Yuqing’s final, backward glance into fragments.
Li Fengzhi’s trembling fingers nearly crushed the note. The words on it blurred into blobs of ink through her tears.
She suddenly knocked over her chair and rushed to the entryway, her slippers making a chaotic echo in the hallway.
"Qingqing—!" Her hoarse cry startled the sparrows on the hallway windowsill.
Su Yuqing, who had already gone down one flight of stairs and was at the landing, froze in place at her mother’s call.
Su Yuqing trembled violently. The wheels of her suitcase caught on the edge of the landing, and it stopped moving.
Chen Mo clearly felt her fingertips go rigid in an instant, like the frozen wings of a butterfly.
As if she heard her daughter stop, Li Fengzhi came running. She rushed down the stairs so fast that she stumbled down the last two steps, hitting her head against the wall. A trickle of blood from the impact immediately stained her disheveled hair.
"Qingqing, don’t go. It’s Mom’s fault. I was wrong! I won’t yell at you anymore."
Hearing the way her mother called her name, Su Yuqing instantly lost control. Tears streamed from her eyes as she threw herself into her mother’s embrace.
"Mom!" Su Yuqing finally cried out loud, the sound shattering years of built-up ice.
’Finally... I’ve finally seen Mom come back to me.’
’It’s been almost three years. Almost three years since she last came back.’
’Her heart trembled, but she knew. When her mother returned like this, it was always for a very... very short time!’
’An hour at most, and then she would be gone again.’
"My good girl, Mom knows you’ve suffered all these years. It’s all my fault," Li Fengzhi wept, holding Su Yuqing.
Even Chen Mo was stunned by this bizarre scene.
But he could sense that the Li Fengzhi before him was clearly not the same Li Fengzhi from moments ago.
’It was like... like she had become a completely different person.’
In her expression, her tone, and even her movements.
Chen Mo’s intuition was right. The Li Fengzhi before him and the Li Fengzhi from moments ago were two different personalities in the same person.
Ever since the ordeal with Su Chengfeng, Li Fengzhi had developed a split personality.
When she was normal, she was normal. But when an episode hit, she would take all her anger out on Su Yuqing.
At first, she really did only have these two personalities.
But every time she finished tormenting her daughter, she would be consumed by deep self-loathing.
Under this constant state of inner torment, she developed a third personality.
A personality that only appeared in very, very rare circumstances—one that had eyes only for her precious daughter.
The reason it appeared so rarely was because no matter how wronged or how much pain she was in, Su Yuqing always did her best to face her mother with a smile, never a look of sorrow.
She would do her best to absorb all the negativity she endured. Only when she truly couldn’t take it anymore would she show her vulnerability and pain in front of Li Fengzhi.
When that happened, Li Fengzhi’s third personality would surface.
In this personality, she would pour all her love into her precious daughter, doing everything in her power to cherish and protect her.
All the pain and suffering her daughter endured because of the other two personalities became a sin that this one had to carry and atone for.
So, in this state, she would prioritize her daughter’s emotions above all else, caring for and cherishing her as much as possible.
This was also one of the reasons Su Yuqing had been able to persevere after shouldering so much negativity on her own for so many years.
It was the fact that her mother would suddenly come back to see her, to love her, at certain specific times.
This was an important hope she clung to during her many moments of sorrow and pain over the years.