Chapter 102 Insanely Jealous
Similarly, Harriet wasn’t sure what had overcome her that day. She couldn’t even bring herself to kill a man, much less her own sister, but she distinctly recalled how downtrodden and hopeless she had felt after she found out she was irreversibly barren that day.
The more elite the family was, the more their daughter-in-law was expected to produce heirs to the family name. If she was medically certified as a barren woman, she would end up miserable no matter which family she married into. She would even be made the laughing stock of the upper echelons of society, and her sterility would be the butt of everyone’s joke.
She had been in a foul mood throughout the few days leading up to the murder, but she kept her resentment to herself. She dared not bring up the matter of her sterility to her parents as well, fearing that they would deem her unworthy of marrying rich and refuse to help her make connections with the eligible scions in their society.
If that happened, her life would be over.
On the same day, she went to another hospital for a second opinion, only to learn that she was congenitally barren. In other words, no treatment could reverse this fact no matter how much the field of medicine had advanced.
Harriet cried and left the hospital in despair. She wasn’t sure how she had ended up at her sister’s place afterward, but when she passed through the living room, she remembered stopping in front of the family picture that hung on the wall.
The family picture depicted her sister and brother-in-law sitting side by side with three happy children in their arms.
Harriet felt insanely jealous then. She had been in love with her brother-in-law for a very long time, but she kept it to herself and told no one about it since he was married to her sister.
Her sister not only married the man Harriet loved but also gave birth to three sons with a fourth one on the way, which added insult to Harriet’s injury. Her husband doted on her and worshiped the ground she walked on; he cared for her and he would get the moon for her if she asked for it.
Harriet couldn’t understand why she and her sister, despite being biologically related, had such different fates.
Where her sister had married the man she loved and given birth to three sons with a daughter along the way, Harriet enjoyed no such happiness. She watched the man she loved marry her sister, and she was medically declared a barren woman. As such, she couldn’t ever have her own children.
At that moment, she stared at the family picture in the living room as poison filled her heart. The more she looked at her sister’s smiling face in the picture, the more she found it irritating; Harriet badly wanted to rip off her sister’s face in the picture and replace it with her own. She remembered thinking how perfect her life would be if she had the same things as her sister had.
She wasn’t greedy. She wouldn’t ask for three sons and a daughter, but for the ability to produce an heir. Alas, she couldn’t even do so since she was irreversibly barren.
Resigned to her fate, she moved on from the living room dejectedly and went up the stairs to where her sister’s room was.
She pushed the door open wearily like she was dreading something, but that was when she saw her sister lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
At the sight of Harriet, her sister lit up in relief and sobbed, “Quick, Harriet! Call the ambulance. I’m bleeding…”
Upon seeing her sister’s tear-stained face, Harriet suddenly thought of the family picture in the living room.
She had wanted to rip her sister’s face off the family picture and replace it with her own.
At that moment, a blind fury descended upon her. It was uncontrollably wild, and it ate away at her reasoning mind. If my sister dies, I can be the one in that family picture! If she dies, I’ll marry my brother-in-law and have her three kids. I won’t ever need to have children of my own, so no one will know that I am barren!
It was as if she was possessed by the devil. She didn’t register the fact that she had turned to close and lock the door, nor did she register her own actions as she pinned her sister down and clapped a hand over her nose and mouth.
All she knew was that when she came back to her senses, her sister was already dead and staring up at her with wide, hollow eyes. Harriet could practically see the haunt of a grudge in her sister’s lifeless gaze.
She scrambled away from the body in horror, but as things were, it was too late.
She started contemplating on the ways she could cover this up. For one, she could pretend that she had only just come into the house and stumbled upon her sister’s dead body.
That could work; she had come to the house during lunchtime when the yard and the living room were empty, so no one could have seen her. She felt safe and fortunate in this belief, but little did she know that by some twist of fate, someone had seen her—a maid who went by the name Cindy Macintosh.
Cindy had gone up to her and blackmailed her. Out of fear, Harriet bought the maid’s silence with a large sum of money. After that, she married her brother-in-law as she wished and adopted her three nephews as her own sons. She told the outside world that she wouldn’t dream of having children of her own, not while she still had her sisters’ children to take care of.
Countless people praised her for her selflessness, and even her parents pointed out how sentimental she was. Nonetheless, they told her that she ought to reconsider having children of her own out of this union.
She had gotten all that she ever wanted—a husband whom she had loved in secret for years, three sons, and a solid reputation.
However, she spent her days in paranoia, terrified that Cindy would show up out of the blue and tell everyone her secret. Her reputation would be ruined if that ever happened, and she would lose everything.
Cindy knew her secret, and that secret loomed over her like the tip of a blade, waiting for the right time to stab through her.
There were plenty of times when she considered killing Cindy. The secret would die with her then, and Harriet wouldn’t need to worry about anyone else finding out the truth. However, killing someone without a trace was not as easy as it sounded. She couldn’t bring herself to commit murder, and she didn’t think she could get away with it for long before the police started cracking down on her.
As such, she spent all these years coping with the paranoia.
There were many nights where she regretted what she had done. She couldn’t count the number of times where she thought about what could’ve happened had she not murdered her sister in cold blood.
Pregnancy was a dangerous thing in itself, and her sister had been advanced at the time to carry a fourth child. She had slipped, fallen, and bled herself halfway to death when Harriet came upon her in the bedroom. In hindsight, she would have died even if Harriet hadn’t done anything.
It went without saying that a natural death on her sister’s part was less horrifying than a murder on Harriet’s.
Perhaps she would have died anyway, and murdering her was unnecessary. That made Harriet realize just how stupid she had been to crown herself as a murderer. Whenever this came to mind, she would be filled with regret and a sense of helplessness.
Presently, she thought about the day she walked into the room and saw her sister lying in a pool of blood. She cried out hysterically, “It’s true! I’m telling the truth! She was already bleeding profusely when I came into the room. There was so much blood; even if I didn’t kill her, she would have died anyway! I’m not a murderer. She slipped and fell to her own death. I swear I’m telling the truth! All of it!”
“Shut up!” Morgan snapped as he lifted his leg and kicked Harriet aggressively. “If you hadn’t killed my mom, she wouldn’t have died! You killed your own sister! You’re heartless, and you’re worse than vermin!”
“No, that’s not true!” Harriet sobbed as she crawled over to Robert. She could feel shards of the broken teacup stabbing into her thighs as blood dripped all over the floor, but she couldn’t care less as she clung to Robert’s leg and pleaded, “Rob, you have to believe me. She would have died even if I didn’t kill her. That was her fate, just as it is mine to marry you! Rob, you know I love you, right? I’ve done nothing but devote myself to you all these years. I poured my heart out to you, and everything I’ve done is for you. I could do the whole world wrong, but I would never hurt you. Please, Rob, save me. Save me!”
