Chapter 393: Do You Really Want to Hear This?

Chapter 393: Chapter 393: Do You Really Want to Hear This?

A group of friends were huddled together, whispering, when a strange voice suddenly cut in, making everyone jump.

They instinctively turned to look and saw a beautiful girl standing nearby, watching them with a cryptic smile. Beside her stood the very person they had just been gossiping about.

There’s nothing more socially mortifying than being caught gossiping, and these young girls hadn’t yet mastered the art of keeping a straight face when confronted.

"Sorry, we didn’t mean to..."

Arabella Donovan gave them a reassuring smile to show she wasn’t offended, but her gaze lingered on the girl who had defended the cheating man. She turned to Iris Donovan. "Do you two... have some history?"

Iris Donovan frantically shook her head. Arabella Donovan arched an eyebrow and turned her questioning gaze to the other girl.

A flicker of guilt crossed the girl’s eyes. She avoided Arabella Donovan’s gaze and stammered out a denial. "...N-No, we don’t."

Arabella Donovan pretended not to notice the girl’s unease. "If you don’t have a personal grudge, then you must really believe what you said," she remarked with a placid smile. "So, you’d be fine with your father keeping a mistress behind your mother’s back? And having children with that other woman?"

The girl’s expression changed in an instant. Her face flushed bright red, a sign of genuine anger.

"How dare you say that? What do you mean, ’keeping a mistress’ and ’having children with another woman’? Watch your mouth!"

"I’m just talking, and you already can’t handle it. Yet you feel free to pontificate when it’s happening to someone else. I guess it’s true you never feel the pain until the knife is cutting your own skin."

"I... I..." The girl seemed to realize the error of her words. Her face paled, and after a moment of struggling, she finally lowered her head in shame. "I’m sorry. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have let my personal feelings sway me or commented on another family’s private matters."

Arabella Donovan gave her a long, hard look and let out a sigh. "You’re sixteen, a year older than your classmates. That’s because you nearly drowned when you were eight, an incident that left you with deep-seated trauma. To help you heal and to make up for years of feeling neglected, your mother had you take a year off from school. She even took a few months of leave herself to stay with you at your maternal grandparents’ home while you recovered."

Ruby Griffin—the girl who had just apologized—stared with wide, astonished eyes. "You... How do you know that?"

"You’re an only child. Your parents are well-off, and your elders dote on you. But you’ve been plagued by misfortune since birth. At age two, you were hospitalized for a sudden high fever. At three, you were nearly abducted. At five, your nanny’s carelessness almost led to you falling down an open elevator shaft. And at eight, you nearly drowned."

Ruby Griffin’s friends all stared at her in astonishment, never imagining she’d had such a turbulent past.

Ruby Griffin was just as shocked. She had only ever heard relatives mention these stories once or twice. She’d been too young to even remember the earliest incidents herself. Yet this person before her knew everything in such detail. Was it a coincidence, or...

Before Ruby Griffin could process it, Arabella Donovan’s next words stunned her even more.

"Before you were eight, you were constantly in life-threatening situations. But after you turned eight, everything went smoothly. Other than your relationship with your father’s side of the family growing distant, nothing seemed to have changed. But is that really what happened?"

"W-What do you mean by that?"

"The reason you’re still alive isn’t because you’re tough. It’s because you’re lucky enough to have a good mother protecting you." Arabella Donovan leaned in and whispered so only Ruby could hear, "What I said earlier wasn’t to mock you or put you on the spot. It was a sincere warning."

"Instead of getting hung up on trivialities and losing sight of what’s important, you should go home and show some compassion for the person who has sacrificed so much for you, only to be schemed against and betrayed by those closest to her."

Ruby Griffin’s pupils constricted, and her lips began to tremble.

By the time she composed herself enough to ask more questions, she saw that Arabella Donovan and her group had already gotten into a car and driven away.

"Ruby, are you okay? What did that girl say to you? You look so pale."

"She said... She said..."

Before Ruby Griffin could finish, another friend cried out, "Oh! I remember now! I knew she looked familiar! She’s that ’Psychic Mouthpiece’ girl who went viral online a while ago!"

"Psychic... Mouthpiece?"

"Here, look." The girl pulled up a video. If Arabella Donovan and her friends had still been there, they would have recognized it as a clip from the coffee shop, where Arabella had furiously exposed Cassandra Lynch’s past misdeeds.

Ruby Griffin’s friends gathered around to watch. They agreed that the ’Mouthpiece’ title was well-deserved—the way she dismantled that two-faced girl was incredibly satisfying to watch. But...

"What about the ’Psychic’ part?"

"According to the girl herself, she was raised in a Sacred Temple and is steeped in Daoist traditions. She claims she ’calculated’ all the shameful things the woman in the video had done. It’s all pretty far-fetched, though. Most people don’t buy it. They think she’s just putting on a mystic persona to intimidate the woman and make her crack under pressure."

Like the netizens who had watched the original stream, the girl speaking clearly shared this skeptical view. She didn’t notice, however, that at the mention of Arabella Donovan’s Daoist background, the color drained from Ruby Griffin’s face.

In the middle of their conversation, Ruby Griffin suddenly broke into a run, startling her friends.

"Ruby, where are you going? We were about to get lunch!"

"I have to go home. You guys go on without me."

Although Iris and Sean Donovan attended a boarding school, Lillian Donovan had gotten them excused from class due to the recent special circumstances, so they were free to come and go.

Logically, with the Croft Family matter resolved, the two of them should have been heading back to the school dorms.

But after a moment’s consideration, they decided to hop in the car with Arabella Donovan and Eloise Donovan instead. It wasn’t that they wanted to extend their time off. They just... wanted to see the drama unfold!

"Arabella! Arabella! What did you say to Ruby Griffin? She looked like she’d seen a ghost!"

"You know her? Are you two close?"

Sean Donovan froze for a second, looking embarrassed. "Close? Not really. It’s just... my sister always takes first place in exams, and she’s always second. Her reputation as ’the eternal runner-up’ is pretty well-known at school. People are always lumping her and my sister together, so I couldn’t help but... pay a little more attention."

Eloise Donovan arched an eyebrow. Recalling how Arabella Donovan had immediately asked if the two girls had a history, a spark of understanding lit up her eyes.

Arabella Donovan nodded at his explanation, her expression unreadable. She didn’t say whether she believed him, only asked with a cryptic smile, "Are you sure you want to know?"