The Billionaire Ex-Wife and the Beggar He Became novel Chapter 75

"You're venomous, you know that? Cursing the people who raised you—aren't you afraid of lightning striking you down? Aren't you scared you'll end up dead in a ditch, you wretched little ingrate?" Henrietta spat the words at Winona, her face twisted with fury.

"Didn't you start cursing me first?" Winona replied quietly, her voice eerily calm as she looked at Henrietta and Teague. "I never did anything to you. For ten years, I haven't set foot in your house unless I was asked, so why do you keep wishing I'd just die?"

These were the people she'd called Mom and Dad for sixteen years.

Everyone always said the ones who raised you mattered more than the ones who gave birth to you. That a child is only truly family to the parents who are there, who feed them, teach them, care for them. If you give birth and walk away, that bond fades with time.

But for Winona, fate had chosen differently.

The couple who'd raised her for sixteen years—Teague and Henrietta—looked at her with nothing but cold hatred the moment they brought their real daughter home.

As for her birth parents, a couple from some remote mountain town, they still refused to acknowledge her.

Teague and Henrietta, meanwhile, seemed to think Winona had stolen sixteen years of happiness that belonged to their real child.

All the hardships she should have faced—the threadbare hand-me-down shoes from her brothers, sharing a cramped bed with them well into her teens, catching lice, getting her period and not even having money for basic necessities, never owning a decent pair of shoes, walking barefoot out to tend the pigs—all of it had fallen, by some cruel twist, on their biological daughter instead.

Those were supposed to be Winona's memories, her life.

But their daughter had lived it for her.

So when Henrietta saw her real daughter's bare feet, cracked and bleeding, the first person she hated was Winona.

The night they brought Felicity home, Henrietta didn't just hold her close and sleep with her arms wrapped around her new-found child. She slapped Winona, hard, across the face.

Winona was stunned. She didn't understand. Back then, she had no idea her mom and dad weren't just tossing her aside—they hated her, down to the marrow.

She was still a little spoiled then, and when her mother's hand struck her, she was about to cry and beg for comfort as she always had. But before a single tear could fall, her birth father lashed out with a kick that sent her sprawling, bruising her ribs.

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