Chapter 19 The Return That Broke Everything
Mu Weiyi looked no different from any ordinary fifteen-year-old girl when she was brought home.
Fair skin, tall and slender, features almost perfectly proportioned. Nothing about her suggested she had ever been trafficked.
Mother knelt in front of her and wailed.
Mu Weiyi only blinked in confusion, completely unmoved.
It was still Officer Tu who explained to us.
She said Mu Weiyi might have suffered an accident before and lost part of her memory.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
Even with memory loss, we could slowly build trust, nurture affection, and become a family again.
The final straw that crushed Mother was discovering that Mu Weiyi had taken the trafficker as her mother. She insisted that Auntie Hua—the Child Kidnapper—was her real mom.
“She lied to you! Weiyi, you are the flesh and blood I carried for ten months!” Mother screamed in grief.
Mu Weiyi stepped back and said coldly,
“No. Mom said you deliberately abandoned me. If she hadn’t taken pity and brought me home, raised me day by day, I might have died long ago.”
“It wasn’t me! Weiyi, Mom never did that…” Mother glared at me in pain and resentment. “I haven’t mentioned it for so many years… it’s all you… it’s all your fault! If you had stayed with Weiyi back then, how could she have been taken!”
She clutched Mu Weiyi’s skirt hem tightly again. “Weiyi, my daughter, she’s just a Child Kidnapper. You were deceived! She raised you only because her own daughter died young and she wanted to use you as a replacement!”
“Then she is my mom too!” Mu Weiyi trembled, seemingly provoked. “Her love for me is real. What right do you have to accuse her?”
Mother clutched her chest, making hoarse choking sounds, and fainted right there.
She was rushed to the emergency room and barely stabilized.
But for her, losing her most beloved daughter for years, finally finding her, only to be rejected—even hated by her—was an unbearable catastrophe.
She collapsed.
I ended up cooperating with the police on evidence collection.
I saw Auntie Hua—the woman who trafficked my sister and raised her for over a decade.
In court, she was sentenced to death. Her face remained calm.
She had trafficked fifteen children over more than ten years. Her crimes were monstrous. Anything less than the heaviest sentence would fail justice and public outrage.
This was her Reap What One Sows.
And mine?
I stared at the word “Justice” beneath the national emblem and fell into a deep daze.
Over these years, Father died suddenly, Mother fell gravely ill, my only sister was lost and amnesiac, and I myself had a mental breakdown.
All that self-righteous revenge—what had it actually brought me?
In front of the reporters and the jury, Mu Weiyi cried uncontrollably.
She said she accepted the court’s judgment, but “Mom” had never mistreated her, and she would never return to the Mu family that abandoned her.
This sparked a massive public outcry.
Overnight, the shattered Mu family became a constant hot search topic. Cameras surrounded us every day.
“Ms. Mu, did you really deliberately abandon your sister?”
“What do you have to say about the tragedies that have happened to your family over the years?”
“It’s rumored that your sister has cut ties with the Mu family and will have no further contact. As an insider, can you reveal the truth?”
…
I was forced to take a leave from school. I took care of Mother, contacted my sister as the police required, and dodged the media.
I was exhausted to the breaking point. I just wanted release.
That was when Zhou Ke appeared.
But not to help me.
He sent me an audio file instead.
A recording left in that movie theater back in high school.