Xiao Yunyun felt it was heavy for no reason as she placed the stack of A4 papers on the dark desk.
Her intuition was telling her that what had been printed on the papers was about her brother’s life, the life of a man whom she had never met.
She knew nothing about her brother. However, she could easily learn about his life through those papers, which had recorded his experiences of more than 20 years in a foreign land.
Xiao Yunyun hesitated for a while before she reached out her hands and opened the documents.
She saw Shen Yuechuan’s photo as soon as she read the first page.
Xiao Yunyun’s hands trembled violently.
She subconsciously stared at the photo for a long time and found that she hadn’t misread it.
It was Shen Yuechuan.
She was sure that it was Shen Yuechuan.
Xiao Yunyun shook her head while repeatedly thinking to herself, “That’s impossible. It couldn’t be him.”
“How could Shen Yuechuan be my half-brother? Maybe my mom asked someone to investigate him because she was suspicious of him after I told her that I loved him.”
“But… if that’s the case, there shouldn’t be so many pages.”
She remembered that Shen Yuechuan had grown up in an orphanage in the United States. By coincidence, it was the same with her brother.
She nearly figured out the truth.
However, Xiao Yunyun didn’t dare to face it.
She closed the documents as fast as she could and tried to put it back into the packet with her trembling hands.
However, before she could do that, a voice within her said, “It turns out to be truth when you have a bad feeling about something. You can’t change the fact even if you put the documents back.”
“You’d better face the reality yourself rather than waiting for your mom to tell you about it.”
Xiao Yunyun squeezed her eyes shut, opened the documents again, and began to read the second page.
She was right. The stack of papers was about Shen Yuechuan’s life.
The details about how he was sent to an orphanage, his experiences there, and his life out of the orphanage after he met Lu Boyan were all recorded in the documents.
In addition, there were some photos attached, most of which were taken when Shen Yuechuan was a child in the orphanage. However, a photo that had been marked with the word “evidence” drew Xiao Yunyun’s attention.
There was only a note in the photo. The note, which was in English, read as follows: “The boy was abandoned by his mother who was from City A. Kind man, could you please take him to an orphanage?”
Xiao Yunyun’s hope dissipated in smoke as if she had been struck by a lightning bolt out of the blue.
She could recognize the words on the note even if they had been smeared. It was Su Yunjin’s handwriting.
Xiao Yunyun realized that fortune had turned its back on her. Su Yunjin had been trying to find out if Shen Yuechuan was the child she had abandoned other than simply investigating him.
The evidence in front of her eyes pointed to a fact—Shen Yuechuan was Xiao Yunyun’s brother whom she thought she had never met.
Xiao Yunyun was in a daze for a long time while all her memories came back in a rush while buzzing wildly in her mind and finally became a mess.
Xiao Yunyun closed her eyes as she clasped her head in her hands. She forced herself to stay calm as if she was going to the operating room.
Fortune would continue embarrassing her regardless of her love for Shen Yuechuan. She had to understand that he was her brother.
She finally figured it out why Su Yunjin had behaved strangely those days.
Xiao Yunyun remembered that Shen Yuechuan had rushed to the hospital and helped her out when she, who had just begun working there, was surrounded by a patient’s family members after they failed to save the patient. Not long after that, she received a call from Su Yunjin.
Su Yunjin was at the airport. She told her that she was flying to America.
Xiao Yunyun knew that the Xiao Family had no business in the USA, so she asked Su Yunjin what she was going to do there. Su Yunjin told her that she would tell her about it in the future.
Su Yunjin was going to America to look for Shen Yuechuan back then. What she would tell her in the future was that she had a brother.
However, Su Yunjin didn’t find anything about Shen Yuechuan because of Lu Boyan.
Su Yunjin met Shen Yuechuan for the first time at the airport when she returned to City A for Su Yicheng’s wedding.
Xiao Yunyun remembered that Su Yunjin blurted out “dear child” as soon as she saw Shen Yuechuan at the airport.
Xiao Yunyun was curious about Su Yunjin’s strange expression at that time, without realizing that Su Yunjin had never called her that way.
She thought to herself, “My mom may have been calling Shen Yuechuan back then.”
“Shen Yuechuan must have inherited a lot of his father’s features.”
That was why Su Yunjin had inquired into Shen Yuechuan’s family background to check whether or not he was her child.
The answer was obvious.
Xiao Yunyun thought it over and realized that Su Yunjin should have received the documents on the day of Su Yicheng’s wedding. It was around this time, Su Yunjin began to object her contact with Shen Yuechuan, and she even arranged a blind date for her with Qin Han.
She picked up the courage to say that she loved Shen Yuechuan back then. Su Yunjin told her with a sad face that she would suffer a lot instead of finding happiness if she insisted on staying with him.
Xiao Yunyun finally knew what Su Yunjin meant.
Su Yunjin didn’t mean that Shen Yuechuan couldn’t make her daughter happy. She wanted to say that it was against social ethics for her daughter to be in love with him, and they would be universally condemned while suffering the consequences.
She and Shen Yuechuan wouldn’t be strong enough to bear all that.
Xiao Yunyun held back her tears as she put the documents back into the packet and put it away as if she had never opened it.
Xiao Yunyun found it hard to breathe as she felt a kind of tremendous pressure on her chest. She left the hotel in a daze. She was already on the pedestrian overpass by the time she came to her senses.
Young men and women in the evening rush hour walked across the pedestrian overpass in a hurry. Some of them were lovers snuggling up to each other while some walked alone with earphones on.
The wide road under the pedestrian overpass was filled up with bright headlights on its left and red taillights on its right. The vehicles whizzed in opposite directions; she didn’t know where they were going.
Xiao Yunyun rested her upper body on the railing of the pedestrian overpass. She failed to hold back her tears, which trickled down one drop after the other like a broken string of pearls and wet the railing.
Xiao Yunyun had to admit that Su Yunjin was right. It was excruciating.
She couldn’t be more familiar with her heart. However, it was the first time that she had known what it was like to have a broken heart.
The pain kept stabbing at her as she breathed as if a needle had been stuck into her heart. She felt an intense pain throughout her body, but she could neither see nor feel where the wound was.
Xiao Yunyun choked with sobs and finally wailed.
She had thought that “lovers turn out to be brother and sister” was a joke.
However, it happened to her. She couldn’t tell anyone about it, not even Su Jianan who was closest to her.
Xiao Yunyun felt lonely for the first time in City A.
Xiao Guoshan had told Xiao Yunyun that City A was a big city where she would have to make new friends and adapt herself to a new environment when she planned to study as an exchange student at University A. He asked her, “You’ll feel lonely for a long time. Are you sure you can bear it?”
Xiao Yunyun still remembered that she had said to Xiao Guoshan with confidence, “Young people like me will never feel lonely in a big city, as long as they have dreams!”
Xiao Yunyun didn’t think about love at that time, nor did she know that she would fall in love with a man in City A.
The man was none other than her half-brother.
She had lived a happy life for more than 20 years. “Maybe God thinks it’s unfair, so it made fun of me,” she thought to herself.
Xiao Yunyun crossed her arms on the railing and buried her head in them. She could no longer hold back her tears, because of which her arms became wet soon.
Her shoulders twitched as she checked her sobs in the dim streetlights. Those who walked past her simply took a quick glance at her and hurried on with their journey.
Nobody had the time to care about a stranger in the city with a busy tempo of life.
After a while, Xiao Yunyun looked up. There were still many people crossing the pedestrian overpass, under which there was still a lot of traffic on the road.
The city, along with the world, remained the same regardless of her sadness.
It was the same as with the fact that Shen Yuechuan was her half-brother. She could do nothing about it.
“But it can be a good thing for me the other way around, right?” she wondered.
She had once thought that she wouldn’t be in a relationship with Shen Yuechuan because she thought that he didn’t fancy her. However, she could stay with him in a different way from now on.
Because she was his sister, she could act like a spoiled child in front of him, learn about his life, pick on his girlfriends, and ask him to spoil her and take care of her, although she couldn’t hug or kiss him as other lovers did.
She even had a reason to visit him at any time.
But she could never talk about the romantic moments when they were together, as if nothing had happened between them.
She didn’t know when she could forget all about that while she thought that a playboy like Shen Yuechuan must have forgotten what he had done to her already.
“That’s not bad. I like Shen Yuechuan, and it’s my business. I’ll keep what happened between us in mind as long as he’s happy,” she told herself.
Xiao Yunyun straightened up as she wiped away her tears, then she walked away and drifted among the crowd.
She thought that she would leave her sorrows and hardships behind as long as she kept moving forward without looking back.
She thought that she would forget Shen Yuechuan and find true love one day.
However, it would happen far in the future. She still couldn’t convince herself to forget him for the time being, although she knew that he was her brother.
After all, she did love Shen Yuechuan.