Some people thought Lu Zhu was too aggressive.
"The old lady might have simply been confused due to dizziness; what’s the need to be so pedantic? Isn’t it better to be kind?"
"Why bother, after all we are classmates, we’ll have to face each other sooner or later..."
Others felt that what Lu Zhu did was not wrong.
"You wouldn’t understand the pain until the knife is in your own flesh, right? Doing good deeds and still being slandered, if it were you, would you not react?"
"Can that mother and son be sued for fraud? This is just too much, how disheartening. In the future, would anyone dare to help an old person who has fallen down?"
The discussion became so intense that the issue quickly escalated into a hot topic in society.
Not only in Lingguang, but media from other regions in China also reported on it, and it even made the TV news.
The number of people discussing the issue also grew, and some began to notice discrepancies.
"It’s said that the young girl worked several jobs at once, isn’t she supposed to be a martyr’s descendant? Shouldn’t the state have arranged for her free education and given her a pension? How could her life be so precarious?"
"That girl’s character seems a bit—extreme. Could something have happened to her?"
Many things don’t hold up under scrutiny.
When grandmother Lu heard the news in the kitchen, her spatula clattered to the ground, narrowly missing her foot.
"How... how has this issue blown up even more?"
They naturally saw the news when Lu Zhu was falsely accused before.
But towards the ousted mother and daughter, Grandmother Lu and her eldest son’s family only felt schadenfreude.
The stubborn girl needed a lesson; her constant frown was exasperating to see.
But as more and more listeners called into radio stations, inquiring why Lu Zhu, as the daughter of a martyr, was living so frugally, Grandmother Lu started to panic.
Xin Yue, her daughter-in-law, was just as anxious.
"Mom, what do we do now? What if they investigate and find out that Xiaolei took her place in school? Won’t we be dragged off to the police station?"
Grandmother Lu shuddered, "Don’t talk nonsense. Aren’t we also the relatives of a martyr? Just say that Lu Zhu voluntarily gave up her spot!"
The two women exchanged glances and saw fear in each other’s eyes.
The things they did back then weighed heavily on their conscience.
Not only had they taken all the pension money, but they also usurped the spot meant for school admission, and kicked her out of the house.
Yet Grandmother Lu had no regrets. Her younger son had died, and since Lu Zhu was a girl and could not carry on the family line, wasn’t it right for her to think about her elder son and real grandchildren?
Lu Zhu’s mother was an outsider and later broke her leg.
That meant a hefty sum of medical expenses.
They were unwilling to spend money on that woman; it was the stubborn Lu Zhu who insisted on leaving with her mother—it was all her own doing!
The more Grandmother Lu thought about it, the more she felt she was not in the wrong—as they had only driven out the woman, not Lu Zhu.
Xin Yue tried to remain composed, "Lu Zhu didn’t lack education; we even gave her money, after all."
But Xin Yue herself knew very well that Lu Zhu had knelt and kowtowed repeatedly at their doorstep until, worried about being seen by the neighbors, they begrudgingly gave her a hundred yuan to make her leave.
After that, Lu Zhu never came back, and the last they’d heard about her was after the middle school exams, through a newspaper.
The two women desperately reassured themselves, as if by doing so, everything would be as if it had never happened.
Uncle Lu didn’t see it that way; he sensed trouble and took the time off work to come back to see his mother.
"I see that the media is fixated on this now; we’re likely to run into trouble if we keep on ."
Grandmother Lu, who was already at her wit’s end, immediately grabbed her son’s hand, "What should we do? We’ll listen to you."
After thinking for a moment, Lu Shao said, "First, we need to find Lu Zhu."
Xin Yue agreed at once, "Right, right, she’s the root of all problems." Otherwise, we’d all still be living in peace.
Lu Shao warned, "When we face Lu Zhu, you can’t say that. We need to bring her and her mother back."
Before Xin Yue could respond, Grandmother Lu snapped, "What? Bring those two harbingers of doom back? I disagree!"
Lu Shao tried to soothe her, "It’s just temporary. Otherwise, we’ll be in even greater trouble."
Seeing his wife and mother unhappy, Lu Shao added, "It’s just for a couple of years. With her grades, if she gets into a university, she might even get a scholarship. By then, if she goes to college, won’t that money become ours again?"
With that said, the two women reluctantly nodded their heads.
"Let’s do what you suggest," better than having those nosy media digging deeper.