226 TOUCH OF SCHADENFREUDE (2/2)
Hu Lei felt impatient even though she had already learnt a lot from the conversation. She wanted to know what Lu Liang meant.
Lu Liang laughed. ”You know that you are very impatient. A lady should be calm and longsuffering.”
”Don't try me.”
”I am only telling you this because you have not treated me poorly in spite of my fall from grace.” The woman smiled. ”Are you sure you want to know?”
Hu Lei hesitated for a while because of the touch of schadenfreude on Lu Liang's face. However, when she thought of all the secrets that her father had hidden, she could not resist the temptation. And if Lu Liang considered it to be a token of gratitude, it had to be good.
She nodded.
Her mother seemed delighted at her choice. ”As I said before, I was always a big supporter of your father. And his ideas almost always became a big success. Over time, he rose to the level of a godly doctor. Unfortunately, it was not enough. For your father, it was never enough.”
Hu Lei knew how true that was. Even in the lab in Antarctica, he never stopped pushing the boundaries in spite of the situation. His love for medicine and science was his drug, and he could not quit.
”At that time, he decided that he wanted a baby. And not just any baby, he wanted the greatest baby in the world.” Lu Liang took a breath. ”I also had wanted a child. However, we had different ideas on conception. I thought that we would conceive the natural way. But your father wanted to edit the genes so that that baby would be perfect.”
Hu Lei felt a cold shiver on her spine, and her scalp tightened.
”Of course, I did not want that. Even though I had always supported him, I could not condone this. I told him as much. But he was set on the idea. I thought that we were at an impasse, and no one would get their way.”
”But then, a little while later, he sedated me and harvested my eggs. I don't know how he tinkered with them, but he was eventually satisfied. I am not clear on how he implanted the embryo. It was around the time I discovered what he had done that we started fighting a lot. I did not want to have an abortion even though I was angry. So, I carried you for nine months and gave birth to the perfect baby.”
Hu Lei felt frozen in place as she listened. She did not pay attention to the sarcasm in the last words. She could not handle the fact that all her life, from before she was even born, she had always been an experiment. It was as if she had a big sign above her with the words 'lab rat'.
In a wooden manner, she stood up, took the document on the table, folded it and put it in her inner breast pocket. She zipped up her jacket and walked out of the house without saying a word. Within a few seconds, Lu Liang heard her motorcycle leaving.
The older woman sighed as she remembered that perfect baby. Hu Lei had not behaved like other children. She had been mature from when she was born. She did not cry or cause trouble. She always seemed to understand everything going on around her. Her mind developed at an unprecedented rate.
All she had wanted was a normal cute baby.