Chapter 290: Let me tell you a story (1)
Chapter 290: Let me tell you a story (1)
Huo Xiao Fan stepped inside, slowly removing her scarf.
Everybody looked wide-eyed at her. They alternated their gazes between her and Liang Xiao Dan. Jianyu, Jing, and the twins had their mouth open in a small O. They looked exactly the same.
T-Twin sisters! Now everything made sense!
Nana also had a similar reaction when she learned about it. But she had no idea that Huo Xiao Fan would be here too, especially when she knew that everything would be out tonight.
Huo Shen trembled in place. It was maybe merely five months for somebody else, but it felt like five long years to him.
“Xiao Fan…” He mumbled. He wanted to reach out to her, but he couldn’t.
Liang Xiao Dan and Liang Zou’s reaction wasn’t any better. It was almost twenty-eight years after they were seeing her for the first time.
“Xiao Fan.”
Her sister, who suddenly left China, was now back and standing right in front of her. And with a shocking revelation that she was the one who kidnapped Nana from the hospital.
Huo Xiao Fan said, “Long time sis.”
Her gaze shifted to Liang Zou and instantly turned cold and was shrouded in hatred. “Liang Zou.”
Liang Xiao Dan slowly came in terms of the realization. She said, “Xiao Fan, you are here after so long. And I didn’t understand. What did you say? You took Nana?”
A sense of anxiety was gripping her chest tightly. They were always good sisters to each other. There was never any enmity between them. So she had no idea why she would do such a thing like that.
Huo Xiao Dan calmly spoke, “Yes, Xiao Dan. I took Nana that night and left her in the orphanage.”
“Why!!?” Liang Xiao Dan broke down in tears. Her chest was heaving up and down in rage and fury. Liang Shin supported her.
The thought of her baby daughter left in the orphanage felt as if a thousand knives were stabbing her inside out.
“Why, Xiao Dan! How could you do this! What did I ever do for you to take such revenge on me! I’m your sister! Do you know what we went through when Nana was gone!? Do you understand the pain!? I-I don’t understand….why would you do this?”
Liang Zou burst out in a fury. “You have gone too far, Xiao Fan! Xiao Dan is your sister and weren’t we good friends too? How can you stab us in the back? We will never forgive you for this!”
“Liang Zou!” Huo Shen yelled, enraged. “Don’t you dare talk to Xiao Fan like that!”
Liang Xiao Dan and Liang Zou widened their eyes in disbelief.
“Shen…What happened to you? Xiao Fan clearly confessed that she took Nana. Then why are you warning Zou?”
Huo Xiao Fan faintly smiled. Huo Shen was still standing by her side.
She stared at Liang Zou. “Who are you to forgive me, Liang Zou? It should be you who must be begging me for forgiveness.”
Nana furrowed her brows. Everybody else was equally confused.
Liang Zou didn’t understand.
“What do you mean? What did I do? You kidnapped my daughter. How is it my fault?”
She sadly chuckled. “You were the cause behind that whole incident, Liang Zou. You, your arrogance and your power was the reason behind the doom. If not for you…,” tears trickled down her cheek, “my daughter would have been alive and here with me today.”
Silence.
Nana rapidly blinked her eyes. The Liang family also wondered if they heard it right.
“And you would have had Nana by your side too,” She continued.
Nana asked, still in a trance, “B-but…Serena is your daughter… and she is…”
She felt a little weird, stating the obvious.
Huo Xiao Fan laughed, tears rolling down. “I am talking about my other daughter… Zhilan’s twin sister who died at the time of birth.”
Every single person apart from Jinhai was shocked to the core.
Jianyu frowned, “But…Serena never told me that she had a twin sister.”
Nana also nodded in a daze. In all these years, Serena never told anything about having a sister.
Huo Xiao Fan said, “That is because even she doesn’t know about her existence. I never told her.”
Liang Xiao Dan paused and then said, “…I…feel truly sorry for your loss. But how is Liang Zou connected to all this?”
“Because during that stormy night in the hospital, it wasn’t only Xiao Dan who was there giving birth to her baby. There was another woman too. And that woman was me.”
She looked at everybody.
“Let me tell you a story.”
*Flashback*
Ning Xiao Dan and Ning Xiao Fan (Ning was the family name before their marriage) were identical twin sisters who always loved each other a lot. Even though they had different temperaments, they still lived together in peace and harmony.
Xiao Dan was always outgoing and cheery as well as confident and outspoken. Xiao Fan, on the other hand, was quiet and reserved. She didn’t like to talk much to others apart from her sister.
But despite the differences in their personality, they were always united as sisters.
Then one day, in high school at the start of their new term, they met Liang Zou and Huo Shen as their classmates, who occupied the last four corner seats in the class.
They soon hit it off and began to hang out together as friends.
Even Xiao Fan, who liked to be quiet, quickly warmed up in their company, particularly with Liang Zou.
Liang Zou was proud and a little arrogant boy, but it was not so excessive. He was excellent in both sports and studies, and those achievements reflected in his attitude too. But overall, he was good-natured.
And soon, Xiao Fan realized that she was in love with him. The late-night assignments, the study time for tests in the library, walking back home from school, and such many more moments drew her closer to him.
But she never got the courage to confess. Because his actions didn’t reflect those same feelings that he perhaps liked her too, so she didn’t want to ruin their friendship. She only loved him in silence.
She didn’t tell it to Xiao Dan too because she knew her sister very well. She would get all excited. She would definitely cook things up to bring them together, and with how outspoken Xiao Dan was, she would have already told Xiao Fan’s feelings to Liang Zou.
Then they got in University, and her feelings only grew stronger and stronger. Watching him from afar and seeing him dating other girls was now beginning to hurt her. She couldn’t take it anymore.
So, she finally decided to take her sister’s help.
The day she went up to Xiao Dan, before Xiao Fan could say anything, Xiao Dan excitedly told her, “Xiao Fan, guess what? Liang Zou confessed to me! We are dating!”
Xiao Fan froze. She was in utter disbelief.
Liang Zou…he confessed to Xiao Dan?
She forced herself to smile, but she was already feeling dead inside. “I-I see…That’s good news. Congratulations.”
It took every bit of strength in her not to break down in tears.
She mumbled, “So, you like him…”
Xiao Dan rolled her eyes. “Not since the beginning. He was such a brat in high school, so haughty and arrogant. But spending time with him made me more and more fond of him. And then I realized that hey! I like him.”
Xiao Fan could only listen in silence. She felt her heart tear into pieces. But she loved Xiao Dan very much. So she supported her love. She didn’t want to be a hindrance to them.
As months passed by, she found it more and more difficult to watch them together. Neither she could tell about her feelings to Liang Zou, nor her sister. She was bottling everything inside her chest.
Xiao Fan thought it was a phase of heartbreak, and it will pass, but it didn’t. She couldn’t forget Liang Zou. She realized that she loved him deeper than she thought.
Xiao Dan noticed it too that she was getting withdrawn, and she did her best to know her problem and help her, but Xiao Fan never told her anything. She always smiled it off.
Then one day, Xiao Fan’s resolve shattered into pieces when she returned home from a study tour a day earlier and found Xiao Dan and Liang Zou in bed together in Xiao Dan’s room.
They had made love.
And that broke apart everything in her. The thought of Liang Zou touching Xiao Dan and making love to her made her mind spin in circles. A weird feeling squeezed her chest.
She quietly ran away from there. That was the day when Xiao Fan cried her heart out. It felt like somebody was stabbing her heart even though there was nothing left of it anymore.
It was a whole night of crying after she came back. And she said only two words to Xiao Dan.
“I’m leaving.”