The cashier: “…”
Ten cans, another ten cans… One hundred cans, another one hundred cans…
Even when all the cans of pet food in the store were gone, the card still wasn’t maxed out yet.
Louis was dumbfounded. “Just how much money is there in there?”
The cashier: “…”
Louis waved and said, “Alright, that’s enough. Store the rest here for now, I’ll come over and collect them tomorrow!”
The cashier finally heaved a sigh of relief.
She had really been very scared just now. The whale in front of her had pretty much bought the whole store!
Louis stared at the bank card in his hand after he left the pet food shop. He had bought the following month’s supply of cat and dog food in the store just now and spent a total of almost 50,000 dollars.
Even so, the card still didn’t seem to be maxed out yet.
He decided to go to the bank to check how much balance there was in it!
—
The cell phone finally stopped beeping.
When Nora saw from the notifications on the phone that Louis had spent about 50,000 dollars all in the pet food store with her card, she knew at once that he had ordered his supply of cat and dog food for the next month.
Couldn’t he pay all at once, though? Why did he have to pay $13.90 and $139 again and again instead?
She shook her head. Unable to understand, she simply stuffed the phone into her pocket.
As soon as she looked up, she saw Cherry and Justin, who were sitting opposite her, staring at her curiously.
Justin didn’t say anything.
Cherry asked, “Who was just sending you text messages just now, Mommy?”
Nora glanced at her and replied, “No one.”
Almost as soon as she said that, a faint voice said, “So, no one sent you 157 messages?”
Nora: “???”
Cherry: “???”
Both of them looked at Justin in unison, only to see that his usually deep and bottomless eyes were looking at her innocently at the moment. Even the beauty mark at the corner of his eye seemed to exude a feeling that he had suffered some kind of injustice, as if she had done something behind his back.
Nora: “…”
She pursed her lips and suddenly asked, “I heard that you have a marriage agreement with Yvonne Smith?”
Her one-liner made Justin sit up straight. His expression turned serious and he replied, “I have to make this clear—my marriage agreement is with a daughter of the Smiths, not specifically Yvonne Smith. Come to think of it, this may be fate between you and me. No wonder you made lo—ving me your first priority the moment you saw me.”
Nora: “…”
Why did he have to pause in between the two syllables for the word ‘loving’, making her feel like she had failed her English classes and misunderstood something?
When she looked at Justin again, he continued to sit where he was with a serious look. He had worn a black suit today and looked extra serious. He probably didn’t mean what she thought he meant, right?
Nora raised her eyebrows. “Oh.”
She got up, glanced at Cherry’s room, and asked, “Where does Pete live?”
She did care about her son, after all, and wanted to see what her son’s room had turned into.
But as soon as she voiced the question, Justin and Cherry exchanged a look.
Seeing that their expressions didn’t look quite right, Nora frowned. “Pete couldn’t possibly not have any place to live in, right?”
“He does, but…” Justin found it hard to explain it in a few words. He said, “But because I had misunderstood his sexual orientation previously… cough, and also because Cherry likes pink, I renovated it into a pink-themed room to make the child happy.”
Nora: “!!!”
She looked at Justin with a complex look. “Are you sure you don’t need me to take a look at your brain?”
Just what kind of person would go along with his son’s wishes and turn the room pink after suspecting that he wasn’t straight?!
The corners of her lips spasmed. She was about to speak when Justin stood up and said, “I have photos of Pete when he was a baby. Do you want to look at them?”
Sure enough, it distracted Nora and she stopped paying attention to the topic about the pink room. She followed Justin to the next room.
When Justin took out an album of Pete’s pictures, Nora started flipping through it from the very beginning.
The first photo was of a tiny little infant. His skin was dark all over, and he looked pitifully skinny.
“Is this from when Pete was a month old?” asked Nora.
As the twins were born prematurely, they were actually both a little skinny when they were born. Cherry had looked about the same as a fifteen-day-old normal baby when she turned one month old.
The photo of Pete looked similar to how Cherry had looked when she was a month old.
Justin kept quiet for a while before he replied, “Yeah, I guess.”
Even though Pete was rescued, his health had suffered a lot. It was only because the Hunts were powerful enough and had their own high-end medical equipment that they managed to slowly restore his health at the cost of a lot of money.
When he was a month old, he had even been sent into the ICU a few times and had tubes inserted into him all over.
However, Justin didn’t intend to tell the woman all that.
Nora kept quiet for a long while.
She had already spotted the date marked at the bottom of the photo.
This was a photo of Pete when he was six months old.
Even if Justin didn’t mention anything, she could still imagine just how much Pete had suffered back then. Otherwise, why would he have mild autism?
Nora heaved a silent sigh and stopped speaking. Instead, she continued to flip through the album in silence.
Pete at one-month-old looked about the same as Cherry at three months old.
Subsequently, though, because Pete was ultimately still a boy, he had slowly caught up with Cherry. This was why the siblings were about the same height now.
Pete had lagged behind for a whole half a year.
In the photos, the little boy always stood there expressionlessly and stared quietly at the camera. His light-less eyes, which looked identical to Cherry’s big round ones, slowly gained some light.
This was all thanks to Justin taking care of him.
Nora flipped through the album from beginning to end. Toward the end, she even occasionally saw photos of Pete with his lip corners quirked upward. He was probably smiling, right?
Nora felt terribly emotional.
She felt like all the emotions she would ever experience in her entire life had emerged in this instant.
She had never been this worked up before. Even when her child was taken away, she had merely felt fury.
She suppressed the acerbity in her heart, and slowly raised her head to look at Justin. “Thank you.”
“If someone has to say thank you,” Justin also looked at her, “Then I should be the one saying it. Thank you for giving me two such lovely family members.”
Ever since his parents divorced and his mother moved out of the family when he was five, he had lost his parents’ love and care for him.
Having been alone for so many years, he had once considered staying alone for the rest of his life. He hadn’t understood familial kinship or feelings in the past, but Pete’s existence had gradually given him something to look forward to.
Rather than saying that he had saved Pete, it was more like Pete had given him salvation during the five years he took care of him.
Nora, who seemed to sense his emotional fluctuations, looked up at him.
She suddenly felt that she shouldn’t have developed thoughts of taking Pete away. He was the boy’s father after all.
—
In the bank.
Louis entered the lobby, took a number, and sat there in line.
When it was his turn, he took out the bank card and handed it to the clerk at the counter. “Please check the balance of this card for me.”
The bank clerk looked up. When she saw the bank card in his hand, she was taken aback!