In her third year at the psychiatric hospital.
The aide came in from the corridor with her brows knitted so tight they almost formed a knot, then lifted a foot and kicked apart the pile of patients tangled together on the floor like some messed-up human stack.
Only when those people scattered, shrieking and twisting, did the woman pinned at the very bottom finally show.
She was curled up and motionless.
Her hair was such a matted mess it hung over her face like a spiderweb. Her eyes were dull and empty. Then she heard the aide snap harshly above her head, "Number 1030, someone from your family is here. Get up and make yourself presentable."
Family...
Did she mean the people who had dumped her in this madhouse and never looked back for three whole years?
Those people were not her family anymore.
Seeing her lie there without moving, like a corpse that had given up, the aide lost patience. She grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her upright. "What, are you dead? Didn't you hear me talking to you?"
Amelia Ashford clutched her head with both hands as she was roughly dragged by the collar into the bathroom.
The woman turned on a high-pressure hose and sprayed Amelia at random while she crouched in the corner. It didn't look like she was cleaning a person. It looked like she was hosing down livestock in a pen.
Twenty minutes later, Amelia was brought into the visitation room.
"Second Young Master Ashford, number 1030 is here."
Amelia's flat, emotionless gaze landed on the man sitting on the sofa in front of her.
His hands were clasped together, elbows braced on his knees, his brows faintly furrowed. The look on his face gave off nothing but irritation and a heavy kind of exhaustion.
This was her second brother, Brendan Ashford.
Back when she was little, her mother had fought with her father. After giving birth to Amelia, she stormed out in a fit of anger.
Her father searched for years and found nothing. He died when she was thirteen. After that, it was her eldest brother and Brendan who held the family together.
Back then, they had sworn to her again and again that as long as they were around, no one would ever get to bully her.
Now, seeing this familiar face from her memories again, Amelia felt a sharp stab in her chest.
But her eyes only turned colder as they lowered.
The hurt was real. The resentment was real too.
Her second brother didn’t dote on her anymore. He was even the one who had personally sent her into the mental hospital.
Brendan Ashford lifted his eyes and looked at Amelia Ashford too.
On the way here, he had still been imagining things. Three years apart—surely she had reflected by now, surely she knew she was wrong, surely the second she saw him she would rush into his arms and beg him to forgive her.
But none of that happened.
She just stood there, not moving an inch, her face blank and cold.
He had come here in such a good mood, carrying the joy of finally taking his little sister home. Yet after three whole years, she didn’t even call him “Second Brother.”
The movement he had made to get up and hug her paused halfway, then quietly withdrew. His tone turned stiff, a little dark. “Clarissa said she missed you. She kept begging me to bring you home, so I came. Starting today, you can leave this place.”
At last, Amelia reacted, but Brendan’s voice changed right after that. “There’s one condition. After you go back, you are not allowed to make things hard for Clarissa again.”
Amelia’s face fell at once.
Did they seriously think that as long as she stopped bothering Clarissa Dunmore, everything in the family would magically be fine?
Back then, the reason she had been thrown into this mental hospital in the first place was because Clarissa had pushed everything along behind the scenes.
Five years ago, the police brought back their mother, who had been missing for fifteen years, along with Clarissa, a girl one year younger than Amelia, and sent them to the Ashford family.
That was when Amelia finally learned the truth: the mother who had never held her even once had been trafficked into a remote mountain village, and Clarissa was the child she had been forced to give birth to.
In other words, Clarissa was her younger sister through the same mother but a different father.
After the family was reunited, both her eldest brother and second brother were deeply moved. Not only did they not dislike Clarissa in the slightest, they treated her like a real little sister and spoiled her to the skies.
At first, Amelia had also been genuinely good to Clarissa. She had opened her heart, wanted to make up for everything the girl had suffered, wanted to treat her better.
Who would’ve thought Clarissa was all tricks and angles—petty schemes here, false accusations there, always setting her up in the dark.
Amelia had kept swallowing it all.
She didn’t want her brothers to get annoyed. She didn’t want their mother to be put on the spot. So as long as she could endure it, she endured.
Until three years ago, when she was trapped in that fire.
Clarissa insisted on rushing in to save her. But when Brendan found the two of them, he snatched Amelia’s gas mask away with his own hands and gave it to Clarissa.
Then he carried Clarissa out of the flames and left Amelia behind, when she was already seconds away from blacking out.
Afterward, Clarissa had even gone out of her way to provoke her, saying Amelia had run into the fire on purpose, just to see who Brendan would choose to save.
The Ashford family only needed one daughter.
The one who wasn’t loved was the extra one.
She’d been so mad she exposed Clarissa Dunmore right there in front of everyone. But Clarissa just threw herself into Brendan Ashford’s arms, squeezed out a few tears, and that was it. The whole family rushed to comfort Clarissa, while Amelia got called vicious, ungrateful, a total white-eyed wolf.