Chapter 88: Chapter 88: Your Mouths Could Hold Up the Falling Sky
Lillian Donovan looked as though she’d just had an epiphany, her face full of curiosity. "Oh, right, so there are layers to this? It means that even though he’s a bit of a tyrant, he still compromises with you sometimes, doesn’t he?"
Lucy Ingram blushed and grumbled, "It was a matter of principle, so how could he compromise? Besides, he has to really piss me off and get banished to the study before he admits he’s wrong. I think he does it on purpose. He might agree out loud, but deep down, he’s probably still completely against it."
"..."
Lillian Donovan felt like she was being force-fed a public display of affection. As someone with her own relationship experience, how could she not see that their so-called "disputes" were nothing more than the cutesy, lovey-dovey squabbles of a couple?
"So, after all that, I was just a damn part of your little game? If I ever get genuinely worked up on your behalf again, I’m an idiot."
Lucy Ingram’s expression stiffened slightly. She refused to admit it. "It really was infuriating. Why are you twisting my words?"
"Heh..."
"Alright, alright." Mrs. Donovan glanced at the two men silently observing from a distance, then interrupted the two with a faint smile to get them back on topic. "Serena hasn’t finished yet."
"Right, right, we got sidetracked. Serena, hurry and tell us, what was that you just said about attracting trouble from petty people?"
"To put it simply, it’s a problem with Mr. Lowe’s personality. He tends to attract petty people who end up resenting him. After all, Mr. Lowe can’t possibly be as patient with everyone as he is with Miss Ingram."
He doesn’t just rack his brain to explain things to her and seek her approval; he even suppresses his own nature to compromise when she insists.
"He has a strong personality and doesn’t like to explain himself. Sometimes, that kind of one-sided communication leads to mismatched information and misunderstandings. Even if his intentions are good, saying nothing can easily cause people to misinterpret him, creating irreconcilable conflicts."
Arabella Donovan said this because she knew that not long from now, Liam Lowe would be backstabbed by the brother he trusted most. He would be ambushed and seriously injured, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
It was precisely because of this major upheaval that the Lowe couple had no energy left to pay attention to their daughter’s personal life, which gave Caleb Croft the perfect opportunity to get close to Joyce Lowe.
By the time Liam Lowe’s condition stabilized and he began to recover, Joyce had already fallen for Caleb Croft’s endless, meticulous care and concern, unknowingly stepping into a situation from which there would be no return.
Therefore, when you traced it all back, the turning point of Joyce’s life was this one tragic event.
And the reason Liam Lowe’s brother betrayed him was all due to a misunderstanding born from a series of unfortunate coincidences.
Liam Lowe’s brother was named Henry Zeller. Their parents had passed away, leaving him with only one living relative: his younger sister, Shannon Zeller.
Five years ago, in an attempt to get his hands on a bid proposal Liam Lowe was holding, Liam’s arch-rival secretly set his sights on Henry Zeller’s only sister.
The rival sent a smooth-talking man pretending to be a rich heir to get close to Shannon, bombarding her daily with flowers, gifts, and confessions of love.
Although the siblings had no parents, Henry had always protected Shannon well, never letting her suffer any hardship as she grew up.
This fostered an overly naive nature in Shannon. The young woman was a blank slate when it came to romance, so how could she possibly withstand such a fierce, premeditated pursuit? Before long, she was won over by the fake heir. They began dating, and she soon became pregnant with his child.
Shannon had been too young to remember much when their parents passed away. Because of this, she had always envied others who had both parents and dreamed of having a complete family of her very own.
The news of the baby overwhelmed her with joy.
So much so that when the fake heir asked her to steal the bid proposal her brother was holding, she agreed without the slightest hesitation.
Fortunately, Liam Lowe had anticipated such tricks from his rival and didn’t let him succeed.
But he never imagined that the person sent to steal the proposal would be Shannon.
By the time Liam Lowe realized something was wrong and gave chase with his men, he found Shannon lying in a pool of blood, barely breathing.
As it turned out, once the fake heir realized his plot had been exposed, he immediately grabbed the still-clueless Shannon and fled in a panic, only to crash the car in his flustered state.
Sensing disaster, the scumbag fled on his own, abandoning the severely injured and unconscious Shannon in a car that could explode at any moment.
When Liam Lowe arrived, Shannon was already taking her last breaths. Gazing at the man who had been like an older brother to her and Henry since they were children, she finally came to her senses and realized she had done something unforgivably foolish.
She tearfully confessed to Liam, explaining that her brother had nothing to do with it and begging him not to take his anger out on Henry.
She also begged him not to tell her brother what she had done, so that she could preserve the good impression he had of her. She wanted him to remember her, even after death, as his sweet, sensible, and understanding little sister.
Liam Lowe agreed. He was overcome with even greater grief when he learned that Shannon had been pregnant with a newly formed fetus at the time of her death.
Worried that Henry Zeller would be even more devastated if he knew the full truth, Liam hid the fact that Shannon had stolen the document. He lied, claiming only that the rival had unexpectedly kidnapped Shannon and then gotten into an accident during the escape, which led to her dying from her injuries.
This was essentially the truth, just with a few details omitted.
But to Henry Zeller, those details were undoubtedly the most important part.
Liam Lowe’s concealment aroused Henry Zeller’s suspicion, giving Liam’s enemy an opening to exploit.
The enemy forged a series of documents and told Henry that while his sister had indeed been kidnapped, the culprits had made it clear that they would release her as long as Liam Lowe let them go.
But Liam, unwilling to give up the bid proposal he had worked so hard to secure, supposedly disregarded Shannon’s life and pursued the culprits relentlessly. This, the story went, was what caused their car to drive erratically and crash.
What’s more, the rival claimed that after the crash, Liam was so focused on chasing the thief that he ignored the gravely injured Shannon, delaying her treatment and ultimately causing her death.
The lie wasn’t particularly clever, and Henry Zeller didn’t believe it at first.
But afterward, whenever he tentatively brought up Shannon’s name to Liam Lowe, Liam would always change the subject.
After this happened a few times, suspicion finally began to take root in Henry’s mind.
And once suspicion enters the equation, the balance is lost. It was only a matter of time before he and Liam Lowe would become enemies.
When Arabella Donovan read this part of the story, she was speechless. ’Are your mouths just for decoration?’
’Every last one of you is more tight-lipped than a clam! Impossible to pry open!’
’It’s like your stubborn silence could hold up the sky if it were falling—and then the sky actually fell!’
’But she was also well aware that, generally speaking, in most novels, the main characters’ inability to communicate is purely a device to drive the plot, to forcibly drag out a multi-million-word, angsty, melodramatic epic of ’you hurt me, I hurt you, you love me, I love you; you hurt me but I still love you, I hurt you but I don’t necessarily hate you.’’
’And when supporting characters can’t communicate, it’s also to move the plot forward, but usually it’s just to make them act like idiots, serve as cannon fodder, and hand the protagonist some kind of cheat or advantage. They’re textbook plot devices, plain and simple.’
