abcnovels
Chapter 165 - The Truth!
Chapter 165 - The Truth!
Chapter 165: The Truth!
His bank records?
Henry was stunned.
So was Wendy.
The next moment, Henry sneered, “Do you think you’re a bank teller? How would you possibly have our bank records?”
Nora, however, ignored them and looked at Melissa instead. She said, “Aunt Melissa, the printer at home has already printed them out. Please get someone to retrieve them.”
The printer?
She hadn’t noticed Nora going to the computer and doing anything, though~
However, she kept quiet about it and went upstairs with the nanny instead. Within a minute, the two of them came back down with a stack of papers.
Nora took out a few sheets from the stack and passed them to Roxanne. She said, “These are the family’s income details.”
Roxanne was taken aback, but she still took the papers from Nora.
Printed on them were details of income that their bank accounts had received over the years.
Every month, Idealian Pharmaceuticals would transfer a sum of money into one of the bank accounts. They amounted to roughly five million dollars a year. This had gone on for 25 years without any interruption at all.
Most importantly, it was the only source of income for all bank cards under the Smiths!
Roxanne was stunned. “What does this mean?”
Nora’s lips curled into a smile as she answered, “Idealian Pharmaceuticals is a company under my mother’s name before she got married.”
A furious Henry retorted, “It became our joint property after we got married!”
Roxanne was dumbfounded. She said, “In other words, your entire family’s income comes from the company that your mother left behind? In that case, what positions do the two of you hold in the company, Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”
The whole family’s income came from Nora’s mother’s company.
Therefore, Roxanne had subconsciously assumed that the two of them worked in the company.
But unexpectedly, Henry and Wendy’s expressions changed as soon as she uttered the question, and both of them became rather embarrassed.
Nora’s lips curled into a smile as she said, “Oh, them? … They don’t hold any positions in there because my mother has handed the company over to a professional manager to handle its affairs.”
Roxanne, “?”
Nora looked at Henry and Wendy, and asked, “The two of you claim that you worked really hard to make money to provide for me, right? May I ask how much, if any, did the two of you make during all these years?”
Her words made Henry flush.
Wendy hemmed and hawed, unable to say anything.
Henry, however, became angry and said, “I told you, those dividends are our joint property after your mother and I got married, so that makes them mine!”
“Tsk.”
Nora smiled and said, “If I recall correctly, my mother left the company to me. Before I come of age, the company was to be managed by a manager, and the dividends entrusted to my guardian—in other words, you. The company is mine now, though.”
These were all agreed on beforehand. The manager had already shown her the prenuptial agreement a long time ago.
Even though Nora still looked half-asleep, her argument was reasonable and well-founded. She looked straight at Roxanne and said, “Therefore, their claim that they worked hard to make money is completely invalid!”
The viewers in the live-stream were also dumbfounded.
‘Damn. So, after all this time, it turns out that they have been living off Ms. Smith’s mother all these years?’
‘What is this? Did he marry into his ex-wife’s family instead of the other way round?’
‘So, after so many years of spending money meant to provide for Ms. Smith, Mr. Smith, a man who sponged off his ex-wife, has found his way over because he doesn’t have any more money to spend?’
‘What is it like to count money at home every day without going to work for more than twenty years? That’s an annual income of over five million dollars and a monthly income of $40,000 to $50,000! Oh my god! How do you even spend that much money?’
‘This plot twist is seriously making me lost for words!’
…
Back at the Andersons’, Henry clenched his jaw.
Wendy straightened her neck stiffly and said, “Even so, we did bring you up! The dividends were all spent on you! Money and whatnot aren’t what matters; what matters the most when a child is growing up is companionship! It’s the fact that we gave you a home!”
A home?
For Nora, that word was a ludicrous mockery in itself.
She scoffed and handed another thick stack of bills detailing the Smiths’ expenditures to Roxanne. She said, “You can check the bills and see for yourselves just how much of the money was spent on me.”
Henry swallowed.
Wendy couldn’t help but smile hastily and say, “How can anyone possibly remember every single expense that took place over a period of more than twenty years, Nora? No matter what, we’re still a family!”
Nora ignored her. She merely looked at Roxanne and asked, “Can you do accounting?”
Roxanne replied, “… Yes, I can.”
For some inexplicable reason, she was now at a disadvantage.
She was obviously a reporter who came to mitigate a family dispute. Why had she suddenly become someone’s assistant instead?
Before one even realized, that woman had already taken control of the situation.
The corners of her lips spasmed as she took out the bills and started going through them.
It would probably take a really long time if she were to really calculate the expenses like that. Thus, Nora kindly said, “Just now, they claimed that they spent all their savings on my medical expenses. Why don’t you calculate how much they’ve spent on that?”
People were required to register with their actual names when they went to the doctors.
If they brought her to the doctors, there would definitely be records of it.
Roxanne nodded and started to look through the bills starting from 25 years ago. At the same time, she also got the cameraman to take out his cell phone and calculate the numbers.
After going through a few pages of the Smiths’ expenditure records, she was stunned. It wasn’t until it reached the point where Nora was five that she finally found a medical record from a hospital. She said, “… 30 dollars.”
The cameraman, “?”
Nora cast her eyes down.
That one was because she was too hungry, so she had eaten expired food and ended up suffering from food poisoning.
Henry ultimately couldn’t let her die. After all, if she were to die before she came of age, then the family’s dividends would be cut off.
Yet, he couldn’t bear to send her to a hospital, so he had sent her to a clinic for an IV drip instead, which had saved her life.
While looking through their expenses in the bills, Roxanne also saw expenses amounting to large sums of money. They were either for expensive handbags and jewelry—Ms. Smith was only a few years old at that time, so they couldn’t have been bought for her—or for stocks or other kinds of investment, which, needless to say, had all ended in losses.
The family’s food expenses were indistinguishable because they were all mixed together.
Another large expense was school fees for an international school, which required almost a hundred thousand dollars in tuition fees every year. However, everyone knew that Ms. Smith didn’t attend school due to poor health, so it went without saying who the tuition fees were for!
The more she saw, the more shocked Roxanne became. At the same time, she also couldn’t help but secretly call Henry a shameless man.
Nora cast her eyes down.
To be honest, there was no way of telling from the bills who the children’s food and clothes were bought for, but she couldn’t be bothered to explain, either.
The clothes were all Angela’s. She was fat back then, so she had worn pajamas instead, and even so, the pajamas were things that Angela had rejected…
However, one could also say that the things that she had experienced in her childhood were a kind of training for her.
Through the camera, Roxanne’s changes in her facial expression and her embarrassment reached everyone who was watching the live-stream. Although she hadn’t said a word, everyone was great at filling in the blanks, so they immediately understood something—
Henry and his family must have mistreated their elder daughter!
Wasn’t this a classic example of a man marrying into his wife’s family and sponging off her, and then hogging her assets after he successfully waited until she died?!
The general opinion of the comments in the live-stream changed, and they began to attack Henry.
Henry himself also realized something. He immediately removed all his pretenses, stared at Nora, and yelled furiously, “Do you know why I didn’t treat you well? It’s because your mother cheated me into a wedding scam! She got herself pregnant before marriage and lied to me!”