Chapter 8
I brought my parents to Long Island to see Joy.
After what happened last night, I had Jade take time off and go home.
Online, even without evidence, people were already believing the story.
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Jade was the president of some club at
school, so her contact information wasn’t a secret. After someone deliberately leaked it, she’d been getting harassed nonstop since last night–people calling to hurl abuse at her.
I hadn’t had time to deal with this yet.
I’d also confiscated Jade’s phone. Now she could only pass time at home with a
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Chapter 8
logged into someone else’s account.
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It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to face
social risks, but this kind of undeserved disaster should be handled together as a family.
When Joy saw me and my parents, she immediately put on a smile. “Dad, Mom,
Jessie!”
She was accepting her new family faster than I’d expected.
My parents still weren’t used to her calling them that. They wanted to stop her but were afraid of hurting her feelings.
As parents, they really weren’t lacking in any way. Even before the paternity test results came out, they were still being
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pulled along by that possibility worried
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Chapter 8
Only I remained unaffected.
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After some small talk, I asked calmly, “Joy, did you see the post on your school
forum?”
Her face stiffened, then she asked in a confused tone, “No. What’s wrong, Jessie?”
“Someone at your school posted anonymously about you and Jade, but the post was full of malice toward Jade. I had someone delete it, but quite a few people had already tracked down Jade based on the clues and started hurling abuse at her. Do you
know anything about this?”
I kept watching Joy’s expression. When I got to the latter part, she seemed
somewhat stiff.
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Chapter 8
satisfaction in her eyes.
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“I don’t know about this,” Joy’s eyes suddenly reddened. “Jessie, do you think I posted it? Is that the kind of person I am in your and Mom and Dad’s hearts?”
Lily spoke up first: “Joy, what Jessie means is, did you tell any classmates or
friends about this?”
Her expression flickered, and only after a long pause did she say quietly, “I mentioned it to my roommates before. Maybe they were standing up for me.”
I’d looked at the comments under that
post–it really could have been posted by someone close to her.
“Spreading this around before the
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test results come out was really too rash.” Roy thought it over but couldn’t help saying this.
His tone wasn’t harsh, but Joy seemed deeply hurt and burst into tears.
“Dad, do you also suspect I deliberately had someone do this? Whether I meant to or not, isn’t it a fact that Jade stole twenty years of my life? I should have grown up by your side, as your beloved daughter and sister! Don’t I have the right to resent her?”
“But even if you two really were switched twenty years ago, Jade was just a newborn baby then. She couldn’t control her own life, much less know about her background. The people you should
resent are those who caused all this, and
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the parents who failed to protect vou
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“But she’s the one who benefited!” Joy collapsed to the floor, resentment flashing in her eyes. “Even now, you still treat her like your own daughter, don’t you? Everything she got should have been
mine!”
Her emotional outburst was too genuine- even my parents felt she wasn’t lying.
This was truly what she believed.
Joy was immersed in that story of switched lives, genuinely resenting the other person who had supposedly taken over her twenty years of life, as well as the perpetrators who had caused it all.
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