Xu Yanxia and Xu Zhanpeng could already guess what happened next without Feng Yiheng having to say it.
Their biological mother must have once again used her beauty and competence to attract the attention of the old Lord Meyer, successfully marrying into a wealthy European family and bringing her stepson, Feng Yiheng, along with her.
Step by step, she amassed the power she held today and groomed Feng Yiheng into a key figure within the family, making him her right-hand man.
...
"So what?"
Even though Feng Yiheng wore a heavy expression, Xu Yanxia asked calmly and coldly, "Why did these things have to wait until now, until it came to this point, for you to tell us?"
"Even if you had enemies at the beginning and couldn't spare the energy because you had to protect yourselves, or if you were afraid of implicating us and thus didn't contact us, why didn't you reach out later when your lives had improved?"
Exactly.
Her older brother, Xu Zhanpeng, also cast his gaze toward Feng Yiheng.
The latter paused for a moment before saying, "Because after arriving in Europe, for safety reasons, we all changed our names and identities. Mom didn't tell Konrad about you at first."
Just as expected.
Xu Yanxia exchanged another glance with Lu Jingming. After all, this was the exact reason why he hadn't been able to uncover their true identities in the beginning.
Under such circumstances, unless they admitted it themselves, no one in the outside world could possibly know that they weren't biological mother and son, but rather stepmother and stepson.
Xu Yanxia asked again, "So later on, did she even forget who she was? Even if your stepfather didn't know she had two other children, did she not know it herself? Even if it was inconvenient for her to come back, couldn't she have written a letter or made a phone call?"
Feng Yiheng said, "All I can say is that our life in Germany actually wasn't that easy."
"Konrad has three biological children, all of whom are older than Mom. They didn't actually welcome her arrival."
"Although they were polite on the surface, they were actually guarding against us at every turn. Our daily whereabouts and even our phone calls were monitored by them. If they found out about our complicated past, they would definitely use our dishonesty as an excuse to kick us out."
"So at first, not only was Mom unable to contact you, but even I never contacted any of my other family members."
Feng Yiheng went on to explain, "Later, after Konrad delegated power to Mom, it's not that she didn't try to contact you. She once took the opportunity of donating charity funds to her hometown to ask people there to pass on money and a message to you. But since she never received a reply, she assumed you hated her."
As soon as he finished speaking, Xu Zhanpeng immediately said, "We never received any news about her. The only bit of information we got was what we found out ourselves when we went to Jingcheng Village later, but the villagers never mentioned any message left for us; they only knew she had donated money to build roads and a school."
Indeed.
Xu Yanxia also said, "She came from there herself. Doesn't she know whether the people there can be trusted? Besides, even if we did hate her, wouldn't that be normal?"
She said calmly, "From our perspective, after our father passed away, she, as our biological mother, quickly left home and married someone else. That would have been one thing, but she hasn't contacted us for so many years. Any normal person would harbor hatred."
Trying her best to restrain her emotions, she rationally told Feng Yiheng, "But she forgot what kind of people our grandparents are. For all these years, while our grandparents worked hard to raise us, they never said a bad word about her, nor did they deliberately make us forget her. They even kept her old photos."
At this point, not only was her brother Xu Zhanpeng looking grave, but her sister-in-law Luo Jiajia also felt a complex mix of emotions.
As someone who grew up with the siblings, it wasn't as if she hadn't seen her childhood sweetheart husband, when they were little, secretly take out his mother's photo to show her. He had told her that he and his sister did have a mother, but she had gone to work far away and could only come back once she had saved enough money...
Even if others didn't know, she knew perfectly well how her husband and sister-in-law had made it through their childhood.
"To be honest with you,"
her sister-in-law Xu Yanxia continued to Feng Yiheng, "Just a few days ago, my aunt even urged me not to hate her. My mother-in-law was also worried that if I didn't inform her of my wedding, it might cause damage to our mother-daughter relationship. But what about her?"
"Even if your lives were difficult at first, didn't she later place you in such an important position within the family business? She herself has grasped so much power in the Meyer family, so why still couldn't she contact us?"
"Did she really have to wait until I went on a TV show, made the trending searches, and she saw it, to suddenly remember that she still had two children in a small town called Qingcheng in mainland China?"
Feng Yiheng fell silent for a moment.
Then Xu Zhanpeng also spoke up, "We thought she might be doing very well and didn't want us to disturb her; we also thought she might be doing poorly and worried that she was suffering; we even wondered if she had gotten into an accident and was no longer in this world."
"Since she hasn't thought of us again for so many years, why did she suddenly appear now? Does even a biological mother have to act like other relatives, first seeing if her children are successful before deciding whether to contact them?"
After all, having suffered deeper childhood wounds, as a young man in his twenties living his life for the first time, he still couldn't be as calm as his sister.
As he spoke, Xu Zhanpeng's eyes couldn't help but turn red again.
After he finished speaking, Feng Yiheng finally opened his mouth again and said, "It's not what you think."
"Although our lives later on weren't as difficult as they were at the beginning, the internal conflicts within the family still exist. Especially since Konrad is now almost ninety years old and his health isn't as good as before, you could say that the infighting is even fiercer than before. If Mom doesn't stay by his side, his children will take advantage of the situation at any moment..."
At this point, he didn't need to continue; the four people beside him already understood.
In other words, the old Lord Meyer was so old that he could pass away at any moment, and the reason the siblings' biological mother still hadn't contacted them was to constantly guard her power.
Xu Yanxia frowned and said, "So even now, the old Lord still doesn't know about my brother and me, right? Then what excuse did Ms. Tang use to come back this time? To attend a business partner's engagement banquet? Or to sign a major cooperation project?"
Feng Yiheng paused and said, "Xiaxia, I understand you're angry, but in a family like that, many things can't be explained simply."
"Mom's plan this time is to meet with you and then go back to tell Konrad the truth. She also plans to bring you back to Germany and give you important positions..."
Before the sentence was even finished, not only did Xu Zhanpeng furrow his brows, but Xu Yanxia also couldn't hold back a sneer.
