At that moment, my father urged impatiently on the other end of the phone, “Did you hear me? This girl likes to eat seafood. Buy more. Don’t be stingy. And don’t forget the red envelope I asked for…”
Before my father could finish speaking, I interrupted him in a cold tone, “Wait. I’ll be there soon.”
He didn’t notice anything unusual in my voice. After a few perfunctory remarks, he hung up the phone. But when I showed up at the door empty-handed, my parents’ expressions instantly shifted.
“Where are the things?” Mom walked over, her tone full of reproach. She glanced outside again and again, unwilling to believe it. “If you can forget something this simple, what else can you even be trusted to do?”
“Forget it, forget it. Just ask someone to deliver it,” Dad said with a glare. “Why are you still standing there? Hurry up and place an order on your phone.”
“I think you’ve gotten used to being a rich wife—lazy, spoiled and gluttonous.”
His words snapped me out of my daze. Yes, I could have lived a life without worrying about food or clothing. But I had fallen out with my in-laws and willingly turned myself into a blood bank for my so-called family. How pitiful!
I sat down on the sofa with a cold expression. In front of all the relatives, I pulled out an IOU and slapped it onto the coffee table. “This is the 50,000 Joseph borrowed from me. When do you plan to pay it back?”
My mother picked up the IOU in confusion. After reading it clearly, her face instantly darkened. “Alice, you actually asked your own brother to sign an IOU?”
She was about to tear it up, but seeing the relatives’ eyes on her, she choked back her anger and changed her tone. “Your father and I have always believed boys should be raised with discipline. We were too strict with him. He’d rather borrow 50,000 dollars from you than ask us. That’s our failure as parents.”
Sensing the awkward tension, the relatives quickly tried to mediate.
“Alice, you’re not short on money. Today is your brother’s big day. Let’s not talk about the 50,000 now.”
“I heard your parents have been transferring 5,000 dollars to you every month. Over the years, that’s way more than 50,000. Your brother doesn’t have a penny. You should be more understanding.”
“Besides, your husband’s family is wealthy. What they save on snacks alone is probably more than this. The richer people are, the stingier they tend to be.”
With everyone siding with her, my mother became even bolder. “Your brother is so considerate. He said he’d take your father and me on a honeymoon. I thought the travel expenses shouldn’t burden the young couple, so you transfer 50,000 from that card to me first. We’ll pay you back eventually.”
I sneered and replied with just two words, “No money.”
My mother jumped up at once. “How could there be no money!”
She pulled up the transfer records on her phone and started scrolling through them one by one, clearly wanting to prove herself right in front of the relatives.
“We’ve given you 180,000 dollars over the years, haven’t we? We agreed this was for emergencies—not for you to waste! I didn’t expect you to become so vain after just three years of marriage. I shouldn’t have sent you to school. What use were all those saintly books you read?”
When I was younger, my parents had set very low academic expectations for me. They always said that girls just needed to be happy. Back then, I thought it was a form of love. Now I realized—they just didn’t want to invest time or money in me.
Calmly, I took out my hospital diagnosis and laid it on the table. “I have cancer. The 5 million dollars in that card are gone. I urgently need money to survive. So you must return that 50,000 dollars!”
“What!” my parents exclaimed in unison, though there wasn’t a trace of concern in their eyes.
My father didn't even glance at the diagnosis and he directly scolded me on the spot, "Alice, in order to avoid giving money, you can even make up a story so far about terminal illness?"
