She reopened her phone and stared at the unknown sender’s last ssage.
"Get out while you still can."
She looked around the apartnt. At the designer furniture she’d picked out with Zeyan’s credit card. At the closet full of clothes he’d bought her. At the life she’d built on the foundation of soone else’s destruction.
"No! I can’t be defeated! It can’t be like this!
Lin Yueling sat on her bedroom floor, knees pulled to her chest, staring at her phone screen as her scandal replayed endlessly across the country in a thousand different variations.
Each refresh brought new horrors. New death threats. New creative descriptions of exactly what the internet thought should happen to her and her unborn child.
Her breath ca shallow, panicked, each inhale catching sowhere in her throat like she’d forgotten how breathing worked.
The apartnt felt smaller with each passing minute. The walls are pressing in. The air was growing thinner. Her designer clothes and expensive furniture suddenly looked like props in soone else’s life, a life she’d built on borrowed ti and broken promises.
She’d stopped crying an hour ago. Now she just sat there, numb and shaking, watching her reputation burn in real-ti.
Then....
The front door slamd open.
"Yueling!"
Her mother’s voice, sharp, commanding, furious, cut through the fog.
Before Yueling could speak, before she could even look up, her mother crossed the room in three swift strides and slapped her.
Not hard. Not enough to really hurt.
But sharp enough to snap her out of her hysteria, the sound cracked through the apartnt like a starting gun.
"Get up. Now."
"M-mom....." Yueling’s voice was small, broken. "I didn’t leak... I didn’t authorize...."
"Stupid girl!" Madam Chen grabbed her arm and hauled her up from the floor. At fifty-three, she was still a force of nature, perfectly styled hair despite the late hour, designer suit without a wrinkle, the kind of woman who’d clawed her way up from nothing and refused to go back down. "I don’t CARE what you did or didn’t do. The whole country thinks you’re a howrecker."
Yueling’s lip trembled. "I know..."
"No. You DON’T know." Her mother’s grip tightened. "You will NEVER marry into the Lu family. Not like this."
"But the baby...."
"The baby makes it WORSE, you fool!" Her mother’s voice rose, then dropped to sothing more dangerous. "An affair is forgivable. But a pregnant mistress during a redemption mont? That’s proof he never changed at all."
Yueling felt tears burning behind her eyes again. "So what do I do?! They’re tearing apart online... I can’t fix this..."
"Stop." Her mother released her arm and stepped back, her expression shifting from anger to sothing more calculated. "Panic accomplishes nothing."
She reached into her designer handbag and pulled out a folder, thick, official-looking, stamped with hospital seals.
Yueling stared at it, her mind too foggy to process what she was seeing.
Her mother knelt down and gripped Yueling’s shoulders with vise-like force, forcing eye contact.
"Listen carefully. I’m only going to explain this once."
Yueling nodded, unable to look away from her mother’s intense gaze.
"You can fix this. And you will."
Her mother held up the folder between them.
"You tell them," she said slowly, clearly, each word precisely enunciated, "that you were carrying your sister’s child."
The words didn’t make sense at first.
Yueling blinked.
Stared.
Didn’t breathe.
"Tell them you were Shuyin’s surrogate."
Her heart stopped.
"M...mom..."
"Shuyin couldn’t have children, the dical records prove it, and he asked your brother-in-law for help. Lu Zeyan arranged everything. You agreed out of love for your sister. The secrecy was to surprise her with a healthy baby."
Yueling’s head spun. "But... we’re not even...."
"Sisters?" Her mother’s smile was sharp. "Who knows that? You’ve used ’sister’ in interviews before. Posted photos together. The narrative already exists, we’re just clarifying it."
"This is insane...."
"This is SURVIVAL." Her mother shook her once, hard. "Do you want to be the villain? Do you want your child to grow up knowing their mother was labeled a howrecker by an entire country?"
"No, but...."
"Then LISTEN." She opened the folder, spreading docunts across the floor. "These are the dical records from the fertility clinic. Shuyin’s infertility diagnosis. Real. Docunted. Six years on file."
Yueling stared at the papers.
Official letterhead. Doctor’s signatures. Hospital stamps.
Diagnosis: Primary Ovarian Insufficiency.
"You... you had these? All this ti?"
"Of course I did." Her mother’s tone suggested this should have been obvious. "I’ve kept these since Shuyin first got the diagnosis. Knowledge is power. I always knew that soday, Shuyin’s weakness could beco our advantage."
The casualness of it, the calculated cruelty, made sothing twist in Yueling’s stomach.
"She doesn’t even know we have these..."
"GOOD." Her mother’s eyes flashed. "People believe the story you tell first. Right now, the public LOVES a self-sacrificing woman. You’re not a mistress, you’re a HERO. The devoted sister who carried her sister’s baby."
Yueling felt her breathing change. Steadying. Slowing.
The panic began to lift, replaced by sothing else.
Understanding.
Opportunity.
But then....
"Wait." Yueling’s voice cracked. "What if... what if Shuyin denies it? What if she cos forward and says this is all a lie?"
Her mother’s expression flickered, just for a second, sothing dark crossing her features.
"That’s... unlikely."
"Why?" Yueling grabbed her mother’s wrist. "Mom, why is it unlikely? Shuyin got out of prison. She’s free now. What if...."
"She won’t," Madam Chen said firmly, but Yueling saw her jaw tighten.
"How can you be so sure?" Yueling’s voice rose with a new kind of panic, different from before, sharper, more specific. "If she gets back together with Lu Zeyan, if he tells her about the surrogate story is all lies, she could destroy us. She could expose everything....."
"She won’t get back together with him."
"You don’t know that!" Yueling stood abruptly, pacing now. "She walked away today, but what if she forgives him? What if they reconcile? What if...." She stopped, her eyes widening. "Mom. If Shuyin and Lu Zeyan get back together, if she starts digging into what happened while she was in prison..."
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