"I wasn't lying."
Facing Wen Leyu's harsh accusation, Xia Yue instinctively began to argue back. "During the three hundred and eighty-five days I was away from Qingshui County, I thought about my child every single day.
"I thought about him in the daytime and at night. I've lost count of how many times I woke up crying from dreams. A child is flesh fallen from a mother's body. If there hadn't been any other way, who would have the heart to separate mother and son?
"When I left, he couldn't be apart from me for even a moment. But in barely a year, he no longer recognizes me. Is it wrong for me to come back for my child now?
"Wen Leyu, you're a mother too. How can you not understand a mother's feelings? How can you wrong me like this?"
"..."
By the time Xia Yue finished speaking, she was already choking up and crying. Cui Siguo, held in her arms, also burst into loud tears.
But no one around them accepted Xia Yue's explanation.
Because the "five-year agreement" Wen Leyu had proposed was a test of truth and falsehood.
If you were willing to give five years first, then you had truly returned for the child. If you weren't willing, then no matter how beautifully you talked, you had some other scheme in mind.
But mother and son were crying so hard that Wu Juying, Li Yue, and the others did not know how to rebut Xia Yue for the moment.
Even decades later, "using the child as an argument" would still be an unfailing killing move. Let alone in the simpler, more honest eighties and nineties?
The middle-aged and elderly people of this era placed far more importance on family and children than people would decades later.