My Mom Married into His Family, and I Don't Dare Call Him Brother

The year my mother married into the Jiang family, I was sixteen.

On my first night there, I started a ledger for the household: 480 yuan for a school uniform, 320 for a backpack, and 21,360 for seventeen new outfits.

Jiang An cut off every price tag, so I looked up each item by its barcode. He put a bank card in my drawer, and I returned it untouched. I worked part-time to save for tuition, wanting only to move out on the day I came of age, without taking a single thing with me.

Until one night, he stood on the stairs and recited my entire week’s work schedule from beginning to end without once looking down.

“You won’t even call me brother.”

Only later did I learn that of the 13,280 yuan I earned that year, 10,600 had come from him.

And that was only the first thing.