Sister, I Love You - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

After a furious argument filled with shouting and recriminations, his father stormed out of the house and never returned.

No one ever saw him again.

People later said that he had been taken away by soldiers and forced to work as a laborer.

At the time, his mother still had a few pieces of jewelry. She sold them for whatever little money they could bring.

Then the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law sat down together and decided to buy three mẫu of farmland.

There was no longer any money to hire laborers, so the two women rolled up their trousers and waded into the rice paddies themselves.

The girl had helped her own parents work the land since she was little. Hardship was nothing new to her; she had already endured more than most people her age could imagine.

Her mother-in-law, however, had never planted rice in her life.

A family that had once been well-off had suddenly fallen into poverty. The man of the household had disappeared without a trace. The older woman was consumed by grief and resentment, and the exhausting work in the fields gradually broke down her health.

Eventually, she became so ill that she could no longer get out of bed.

Shortly before she died, she reached for the young woman's hand.

Her voice was weak, almost pleading.

“He is still so young and helpless. Please, take care of him. If you ever want to leave, please… wait until he is grown.”

The girl tightened her grip around his hand.

From that day on, his fate was once again placed in her hands.

She was a woman who valued loyalty and kept her promises, even promises she had never actually made.

And so she stayed by his side, just as she always had.

As the years passed, even she could no longer tell what she truly was to him.

His wife?

His older sister?

Or his mother?

She worked from dawn until long after dark, day after day, so that he could continue his education.

Their life remained poor and difficult, but it was also strangely peaceful—held together by the deep affection between brother and sister, by a love as vast as a mother's, and by a bond that had grown stronger through every hardship they had endured together.

When he graduated from high school and was accepted into a teachers' university, she packed his belongings for him and once again accompanied him to school.

She looked at the young man standing before her, barely out of adolescence, the boy she had raised with her own hands from childhood into adulthood.

She simply told him to study hard.

She said nothing more.

But he looked at her and said,

“Sister, wait for me. I'll come back.”

Her heart gave a small, sudden beat.

Yet her expression remained composed.

Only the faintest smile appeared at the corner of her lips, so subtle that no one else would have noticed it.

That smile was not because of what he had said.

It was because, for the first time, she felt that everything she had sacrificed had finally begun to bear fruit.

She continued working the fields as she always had, going without food and new clothes whenever necessary so that she could save every bit of money to send to him.

During the first two years, he returned home during summer and Lunar New Year holidays to help her with the farm work.

But in his third year of university, a letter arrived.

Don't send me any more money, Sister.

And I won't be coming home during the holidays anymore.

I want to find a part-time job and earn some money. I don't want you to have to carry everything by yourself.

By then, she was twenty-nine years old.