"Mm. To explain this, I'll have to start from the beginning. Xixi came from the countryside. Her parents... the ones surnamed Zhou, they were country people. They married young and had Xixi. Since she was a girl, they didn't care for her and didn't pay her much attention from the start. Later, they gave her to a relative to raise—one of Xixi's aunts. The aunt's husband had died, and she had no children. It was sort of like the old-fashioned image of a widow, living as a widow and raising a relative's child for company. That's more or less what Xixi told me. After she graduated from high school, she came to Minqing to look for work and enrolled in night school. By then, her aunt had died of an illness. Xixi wasn't really in touch with her family anymore."
"Mm."
"Several years after her parents gave her away, they had a son. He was seven or eight years younger than her, maybe around ten. I'm not entirely sure; she never asked about it in detail. I only found out about this when her parents came to the company and caused a scene one day. Her parents were... honestly, they were disgusting. They acted as if Xixi owed them, not the other way around. They brazenly told her that her younger brother was sick and needed a kidney transplant, and ordered her to go to the hospital for testing. At first, Xixi didn't recognize them, and they didn't recognize her either. I don't know how they found her. They went around the company asking which one was Zhou Xixi, and as soon as they found her, they started saying, 'Your younger brother...' and all that. It took a while before we realized they were Xixi's parents. They even had the