With Jessica's question, Grandma Nelly's tears fell. "You have really suffered over the years."
Without a clear understanding of why she had said so or what might have prompted her to say so, Jessica did the only thing that seemed feasible at the moment.
She calmly patted the old lady's back, giving her time to pour out her pent-up emotion. Taking a glance back into the past, she couldn't recall when the old lady had ever cried.
Even in times when she would cry, complain, or languish bitterly about her predicament, her mother's death, her father's heartlessness and the peril she was passing through, Grandma Nelly would always keep a strong front, making her believe all had been well.
When she returned to the countryside barefooted, in tattered clothes with bruises on some parts of her body, she only sighed and said, "Nora had expected this."
