Chapter 360: The Punctured Lie

“Ruan Ruan, that’s your cousin’s boyfriend, Zheng Weiyi. He and your cousin have been together for four years, and this is his first time visiting!”

…

Just after Liu Ting finished speaking, the others all immediately stood up and chimed in.

“Are you going to tell me or not?”

“If you don’t, I’m leaving right now.”

Jiang Ruan looked at them calmly.

One second, two seconds, three seconds…

They exchanged glances, but no one said a word.

Seeing this, Jiang Ruan turned to leave without the slightest hesitation.

“Ruan Ruan!”

“Tell me, is it true you don’t work at Southern Airlines?”

“Have you been deceiving me and your mother this whole time?”

As Jiang Dong’s voice faded, Jiang Ruan, who had only taken a couple of steps, suddenly went rigid. Her feet slowed to a stop.

“Ruan Ruan, your cousin’s boyfriend works in the General Affairs Department of the Civil Aviation Administration. While we were chatting just now, Xiaozheng said his work often requires him to deal with many leaders within Southern Airlines.”

“Your grandmother meant well. You always say you’re busy with overtime, so she wondered if Xiaozheng could ask a leader he knows at Southern Airlines to put in a good word for you—maybe they could help you out a bit with work, so you wouldn’t have to struggle so much.”

“But as it turns out…”

As Liu Ting spoke, her eyes started to turn red.

“After Xiaozheng made the call, the leader from Southern Airlines said he searched their internal system several times. He even searched the list of former flight attendants who had resigned. But he never found any record of a flight attendant named Jiang Ruan at Southern Airlines.”

Liu Ting tightly gripped Jiang Ruan’s hands, afraid she would slip away and leave. “So Ruan Ruan, what on earth is going on? Where have you really been working since you graduated?”

Jiang Ruan stood rooted to the spot, her expression a little dazed.

The bubble of her lies had finally been popped.

Luckily for her, by the time the bubble burst, she had already built up enough confidence to handle anything.

Facing the worried and anxious gazes of her family, Jiang Ruan took a deep breath and turned to her parents. “I’m sorry, I did lie to you. Ruoyu’s boyfriend’s boss was right. There has never been a flight attendant at Southern Airlines named Jiang Ruan.”

Hearing Jiang Ruan admit it herself, the last glimmer of hope remaining in Liu Ting and Jiang Dong’s hearts was completely extinguished.

Seeing the light in her parents’ eyes dim and the bitter expressions on their faces, Jiang Ruan felt a sharp, needle-like pain in her heart.

Her hesitation vanished, and she instantly made a decision.

“Because…”

“I’ve been working at Ruyi Airlines from the very beginning.”

Jiang Ruan couldn’t bear to see her parents, who had always been so proud of her, lose face in front of so many relatives and friends, so she decided to selectively conceal her experiences from the past two years.

“Ruyi Airlines?”

“Is that an airline too?”

“How come I’ve never heard of it?”

No one expected such a turn of events. But Jiang Dong, Liu Ting, and the others were just common folk from a small border town. They could count the number of times they’d flown in their lives on one hand, so it was perfectly normal that they’d never heard of Ruyi Airlines.

Faced with her mother’s question, Jiang Ruan didn’t answer. Instead, she cast her cool gaze toward her cousin Zhou Ruoyu’s boyfriend.

“Uncle, Auntie, Ruyi Airlines is one of the top private airlines in the country. Its current market value should be over twenty billion.”

When Zheng Weiyi saw the look from his girlfriend’s cousin, he immediately understood what she meant. Thinking about the “disaster” he had just caused, he could only give a wry smile and take on the task of explaining.

“‘Private airline’—does that mean it’s a private company?”

Jiang Dong pressed Zheng Weiyi.

“Yes.”

Zheng Weiyi nodded.

“Ruan Ruan, how did you end up working for a private airline?”

Jiang Dong frowned slightly. “When you graduated, didn’t you say you had a guaranteed spot at Southern Airlines? Later, you wanted to try for their Pearl Blue program. You said you had a senior schoolmate with connections in the Civil Aviation Administration and even took 100,000 yuan from home.”

In the north, there’s a deep-seated reverence for official positions.

People of her parents’ generation, in particular, have an almost fanatical preference for stable, state-sector jobs.

Even though Southern Airlines and Ruyi Airlines are both airlines, the former is a state-owned enterprise while the latter is private. In her parents’ eyes, that made a world of difference.

To them, private companies were synonymous with instability, a far cry from the security and reliability of a job at a state-owned enterprise.

“I was scammed.”

With a composed expression, Jiang Ruan told her parents and relatives the truth: how she’d been scammed out of 250,000 yuan two years ago after graduation.

At the end of her story, however, she made a few alterations. She claimed that after missing the recruitment window for all other airlines, only Ruyi Airlines was still hiring. She also omitted her year spent working at a Mercedes-Benz dealership, replacing it with the story that she had been with Ruyi Airlines all along.

“You…”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were scammed?!”

“Even if you missed the recruitment window, you could have just waited and applied again next year! It’s not like our family can’t support you! How could you be so impulsive and go to Ruyi Airlines!”

Hearing about Jiang Ruan’s experiences over the past two years, Jiang Dong’s heart ached with both pain and anger.

He wasn’t heartbroken over the lost 250,000 yuan. He was heartbroken that Jiang Ruan—who was still just a kid, who had her parents to lean on—had instead stubbornly toughed it out all on her own for two long years.

“Uncle…”