Someone in the comments had asked:
"Your mom treats you that badly and you're still buying her stuff?"
She'd replied:
"This is my mother-in-law. I'm so lucky I met my husband, because he gave me this amazing woman. She's the one who showed me what a mother's love actually feels like. She's a thousand times better than my real mom."
When I read that reply, something slammed into my chest. A sharp, crushing ache that wouldn't let go.
My husband and I built everything from nothing. We scraped and clawed our way through years of hardship to get where we are.
But we never once let our daughter go without.
When Summer was born, my mother-in-law sneered that she was just a girl and wanted us to give her away.
My husband and I fought tooth and nail to keep her. He nearly disowned his own parents over it.
When we left to build the business, no matter how grueling things got, we kept her with us.
Our apartment was barely a hundred square feet. We slept on the floor so she could have the only bed.
To give her a better life, we poured every cent of our savings into sending her to the best private schools.
After she graduated high school and the company had finally started to take off, we sent her abroad for college.
I was afraid she'd struggle adjusting on her own, so I left my husband and our growing business behind and flew overseas to stay with her for six months, until she'd settled in.
By the time I came back, my husband's health had broken down. Ankylosing spondylitis. The years of overwork had caught up with him.
His parents never stopped pressuring us to have a second child. We held firm and refused, every single time.
Because neither of us wanted our daughter to ever feel like her love was being divided.
And now my precious girl, the one I'd held so carefully all her life, afraid she'd melt on my tongue or shatter in my hands, had fabricated those vicious lies for the whole world to see.
My eyes burned red. I lowered my head and wiped away the tears.
My husband couldn't take it. He stood up, ready to march over and demand an explanation.
I grabbed his arm and pointed at the clock on the wall.
"Look at the time. Summer's been asleep for hours."
"Maybe there's some kind of misunderstanding. One more night won't hurt. We'll ask her in the morning."
He turned his head away and let out a long breath.
"Fine. But tomorrow I'm getting a straight answer."