Chapter 43 Extending Love And Protection
After Maggie helped pull her up from the floor, Kendall picked up her keys and phone and paid the front desk for six months of sparring sessions.
She also added Maggie's contact information, which would make coming back much more convenient in the future.
Sweating felt great at the time, but the sticky feeling afterward was uncomfortable. After leaving the martial arts gym, Kendall didn't go anywhere else but drove home. The first thing she did upon arriving home was take a shower.
While having dinner, Kendall received a call from a staff member of the '30 Days of Survival' program, asking if she was available tomorrow at nine in the morning to shoot promotional photos at the Orange Entertainment Building.
Kendall surmised that all the guests for the show must have been confirmed. "Yes, I'll be there on time," she agreed.
———
At the Sinclair family villa, Normand and Neil both came home earlier than usual.
Not seeing Nathan by the door, Neil asked, "Mom, where is Nathan?"
"He's upstairs in his room," Victoria said, gesturing toward the second floor. "After Kendall left, your brother stood by the door watching with longing eyes for half an hour, then went back to his room."
Neil breathed a sigh of relief. "As long as he didn't go to the hotel."
Staying home and moping is certainly better than moping outside the hotel elevator.
From behind him, Normand quietly took out a file from his briefcase and handed it to Victoria, who took it, confused. "What is this?"
Normand replied, "Kendall's information."
The fact that the Sinclair family had a staff member call Kendall to schedule the meeting showed that, although the Sinclair family were the hotel's owners, they still followed the rules and hadn't used their power to violate a guest's privacy.
It wasn't until meeting Kendall and observing her behaviour and conversation that Normand felt the girl's character and refinement were excellent, leading him to ask a private investigator to look into her background.
If the Sinclair family had found Kendall to be insincere or of questionable character during lunch, they wouldn't have allowed the two to meet a second time, even if Nathan were to camp out by the elevator every day, especially given Nathan's unique situation.
The thin A4 sheets only contained a few paragraphs of text, which Victoria finished reading in minutes.
"An orphan? A relative of the Hansen family? Kicked out a few days ago?" Victoria frowned slightly, her disapproval of the Hansen family's actions evident.
"Jake's wife, I've met her. She's full of ill intentions and is not an easy person to get along with." Thinking of Kendall's slender figure, Victoria felt a pang of sympathy. "No wonder she's so thin. Who knows if she was being mistreated."
Neil, who had already read the file, pushed up his glasses and stated matter-of-factly, "Their daughter was trying to corner me with a glass of wine at a previous event."
As a famous bachelor in Orapolis, countless women wanted to sleep with Neil. He hadn't paid much attention to the incident at the time, but a friend in the industry later sent him a picture of Mia in the entertainment world and teased him about it, giving him a slight memory of the name.
Neil's comment made Victoria even more sympathetic toward Kendall.
"Her relationship with the Hansen family doesn't seem simple," Normand said calmly.
"She earned her way into Crestwood University from the mountains and studied alone in Orapolis until her final year, when the Hansen family suddenly contacted her, took her in, and claimed publicly she was a distant relative staying with them. "
No one present was a fool, and they immediately sensed something was wrong with Normand's statement.
What kind of relative wouldn't be in contact for the first couple of years, only to suddenly appear halfway through college?
Furthermore, based on Astoria's student enrolment age, Kendall would have been at least eighteen when she started her freshman year. By her final year, she was at least twenty-one.
When she first arrived in Orapolis, facing an unfamiliar environment, that was when Kendall needed care and help the most. Yet, the Hansen family only came forward after she had been in Orapolis for three years?
Crestwood University is not only a prestigious century-old institution in Orapolis, but its ranking is nationally renowned. The campus is vast, the facilities are first-class, and the accommodation is excellent.
Why would Kendall leave a perfectly good dorm room to live at a relative's house? And she stayed there until she was recently kicked out by the Hansen family.
This whole situation smelled fishy.
Victoria trusted her judgment of people. "Kendall was definitely bullied."
Normand nodded. "I've already asked the private investigator to look into it further. We can ask her later if she needs the Sinclair family's help."
This was the first person Nathan had shown affection for, and the Sinclair family was universally protective of their own, extending their love and protection to Kendall by association.
Kendall didn't know that after only one meeting, she had already been quietly brought under the Sinclair family's protective wing.
———
The next day, Kendall arrived at the Orange Entertainment Building on time.
Since she had contacted the staff previously and had come here to sign the contract before, she was familiar with the layout of the building.
After a staff member led her to the studio, Kendall found that she was the only one there.
Why weren't the other guests present for the promotional shoot?
Even if the production team wanted to conceal the guest's identities from the audience to heighten the mystery, is it still necessary to film the promotional photos separately to prevent guests from knowing each other...? Was the production team deliberately causing trouble?
Kendall had a hunch. Since Jasper and Liam were both participating, could Mia, whom they always protected, be far behind? Kendall suddenly smiled with interest. Competing on the same variety show wasn't scary, what was awkward was having one's fake identity exposed.
Although Kendall had been slammed on trending searches multiple times because of Mia, she wasn't a celebrity and had never done a promotional shoot.
However, Kendall had a great foundation and was photogenic enough. Moreover, this was a survival reality show, not a celebrity showcase, so the requirements for the promotional photos weren't overly strict.
Half an hour later, Kendall finished the shoot and walked out of the studio, leaving the Orange Entertainment.
Perhaps because Kendall was the last to shoot, or perhaps because the '30 Days of Survival' production team was highly efficient, the official TikTok account for the show immediately posted the professionally edited promotional pictures that same afternoon.
Unlike the production team's previous strategy of revealing one guest's identity every few days, this time they released a grid of nine pictures, revealing all the guest's information at once.
The fact that the '30 Days of Survival' program has been produced continuously for seven years shows how wide its audience is. It is a show many viewers look forward to every year.
Excited, netizens who saw the official TikTok post clicked on it, ready to praise the production team for finally revealing all the guests at once without keeping them in suspense. However, the next second, after clearly reading the list of guests...
'Production team, hurry up and die!'
(End of Chapter)