Ungrateful My Adopted Daughter's Betrayal Cost Her Everything

I'd spent the whole day looking after my granddaughter. I was lying in bed, just about to close my eyes, when I saw my own daughter's video on TikTok.

"First drink's for me. In first grade, I scored 99 out of 100 on a math test and my parents nearly beat me to death for it."

"Second drink's for me. My parents wanted a son so badly that on my eighteenth birthday, they announced they were pregnant again and kicked me out of the house to fend for myself."

"Third drink's for me. When I got married, my parents refused to give me a single dollar for my dowry, then demanded $130,000 in bride price from my husband, saying they needed it to buy my little brother a house. And now they've moved into MY place."

I scrolled through the comments. Every last one was tearing us apart.

I sat there, stunned. That house was mine. I bought it.

And since when did I have a son?

……

I shook my husband awake and shoved the phone into his hands.

"Honey, look. Is this our Summer James?"

He put on his reading glasses and squinted at the screen.

"Yeah. That's our girl."

Ten seconds in, the crease between his brows deepened into a hard knot.

"What is she saying? Why is she making all this up?"

He tapped into the comments. Every single one was venom.

"Some people don't deserve to be parents."

"Those two old monsters. How do they sleep at night?"

"Hope they walk into traffic tomorrow."

"Girl, just cut them off. Go no-contact. Run and never look back."

My husband's face turned a deep, mottled red. His breathing grew heavier with each passing second.

I scrambled to find his blood pressure medication and pressed the pills into his hand.

I rubbed his back, still unable to believe those words had come from the daughter I loved more than anything in this world.

"Don't get worked up yet. AI is so advanced these days. Maybe someone deepfaked her face onto the video."

He caught his breath, his hands trembling as he passed the phone back to me.

"Go to her profile. Look at the rest of her page. It's her."

"What is she trying to do? How could she say something this vile?"

I scrolled through Summer's profile. That video was pinned to the top. Over 300,000 likes.

Her most recent post was a video of her arm-in-arm with her mother-in-law, the two of them strolling through a mall, laughing like best friends.

The caption read:

"Taking Mom out for a shopping spree!"

Someone in the comments had asked:

"Your mom treats you that badly and you're still buying her stuff?"

She'd replied:

"This is my mother-in-law. I'm so lucky I met my husband, because he gave me this amazing woman. She's the one who showed me what a mother's love actually feels like. She's a thousand times better than my real mom."

When I read that reply, something slammed into my chest. A sharp, crushing ache that wouldn't let go.

My husband and I built everything from nothing. We scraped and clawed our way through years of hardship to get where we are.

But we never once let our daughter go without.

When Summer was born, my mother-in-law sneered that she was just a girl and wanted us to give her away.

My husband and I fought tooth and nail to keep her. He nearly disowned his own parents over it.

When we left to build the business, no matter how grueling things got, we kept her with us.

Our apartment was barely a hundred square feet. We slept on the floor so she could have the only bed.

To give her a better life, we poured every cent of our savings into sending her to the best private schools.

After she graduated high school and the company had finally started to take off, we sent her abroad for college.

I was afraid she'd struggle adjusting on her own, so I left my husband and our growing business behind and flew overseas to stay with her for six months, until she'd settled in.

By the time I came back, my husband's health had broken down. Ankylosing spondylitis. The years of overwork had caught up with him.

His parents never stopped pressuring us to have a second child. We held firm and refused, every single time.