Is Taking Back A Gift Considered Rude?

After my year-end bonus came in, I immediately transferred 10,000 dollars to my husband to buy New Year’s gifts for both our parents. I even told him to get the very best, especially that case of whisky for my father. On New Year’s Eve, I rushed home to have dinner with my parents. However, at the table that night, Dad, who had always loved his drinks, was sipping tea instead. I was confused. “Dad, it’s the holidays. Why didn't you bring out the liquor?” I smiled as I rose to my feet to grab the case. “Kevin went out of his way to get this. I heard it tastes amazing.” “Don’t touch it!” Dad slammed his teacup against the floor. His face was flushed dark red. “Zeena, don’t send this stuff anymore. I know it’s not easy for you to make money in the city. But even if our Collins family is poor, we still have our pride! People in the village are talking behind my back, saying I’m putting on airs!” I was completely stunned. I opened the bottle and took a sip, then froze for a moment. This was not whisky at all. It was just plain water.

I ditched a shot at studying abroad to help my boyfriend, Gavin Censori, launch his startup. Stuck it out with him through seven brutal years. Then boom—success hit, and so did the ghosting. On Valentine's Day, he hit me with the classic "work's crazy" excuse. Instead of showing up, he had some random delivery dude drop off a box of cosmetic samples. Samples. Later that night, his secretary Rebecca popped up on my feed, flexing hard. Caption: [With a boss like this, why go home early?] Pic: A box of high-end makeup. Same brand. Hers weren't samples. I dropped a comment: [You're doing great at your sidechick job. Gold star.] Gavin called instantly, losing it. "What's your problem? She's just an employee! I bust my ass making money for you, and you're always jealous!" I laughed. Didn't even yell. Just dumped him. Seven years, and I'd never touched a dime of his. Joke's on him—his precious startup? Secretly bankrolled by me. Fast-forward three years. Business summit. He rolled in wearing a tailored suit. The second he spotted me with a bag of bottles, his smirk kicked in. "Didn't like those cosmetics I gave you, huh? Now look at you—reduced to bottle collecting?"

I had just won the Hawthorne Scientific Laureate on the international stage when my father called me back home. "Bring the betrothal gifts to the Hayes family. That childhood engagement should finally be fulfilled." Afraid of getting stuck in traffic, I took my modified motorcycle, carried the national heritage porcelain obtained through generations of the Keane family's military merits, and headed toward their house. Just as I arrived at the community gate, a Porsche suddenly cut across the lane, nearly knocking me over. A heavily made-up woman, Zoey Mercer, stepped out of the car, raised one sharp high heel, and kicked the top box off my motorcycle. "You rode this junk motorcycle yet dared block my way? If you dent my car, your whole family won't be able to afford the compensation!" My heart sank. I quickly opened the case, only to see the entire box of celadon porcelain shattered. "So you’re just some delivery guy. Think this pile of trash is worth even one of my shoes? "You even know whose neighborhood this is? It belongs to Kingshore's Hayes family! My best friend’s family developed this place! Believe it or not, I can have you thrown out right now!" Right then, my fiancee, Lauren Hayes, called me. "Where are you? My friend just messaged me saying there’s a delivery guy causing trouble at the entrance."

I’d been with Hurley, the heir to the Crescent Claw pack, for seven years. He’d insisted on throwing me a huge birthday party. But on the day of the party, Hurley gave the million-dollar custom gown my mother had commissioned for me to his childhood friend, Rachel. He said it so casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Rachel’s dress got ruined, and we couldn’t find a replacement in time. You two are about the same size, so I just let her borrow it.” “I remember you have a few backup dresses, right? Why don’t you just wear one of those tonight?” I thought back on the past seven years, and how this wasn't the first time he'd put me second for Rachel. For one of my birthdays, he gave me a cheap necklace from a street stall but bought Rachel a ruby necklace at a high-end auction. His excuse? “You’re an Alpha’s daughter; you already have everything. Rachel’s different.” When I was sick with a fever and needed him, he was busy comforting Rachel because she was afraid of the dark. He’d told me, “Rachel’s fragile and timid. She needs me more.” It happened over and over again. This time, I was finally done. The borrowed dress and the unfaithful man—I wanted neither.

The day my father was diagnosed with liver cancer, I took out the cash gift I had received from my wedding to cover the emergency costs. The bank teller counted the amount multiple times. At that moment, I learned that out of the twenty thousand dollars cash gift Peter Grant’s family had given me a year ago, eighteen thousand dollars were counterfeit. I went home with the fake money to demand an explanation. My mother-in-law, Deborah, stepped on my father’s picture and called him a worthless man who deserved to die. Peter refused to divorce me. He demanded that I pay back the twenty thousand dollars in cash before he would agree to the divorce. When I refused, he started a live stream. He held up my undergarments for tens of thousands of viewers to see. “Look at what my wife is wearing. Is she trying to save her dad, or is she trying to seduce him? “We’ve been married for a whole year, and she hasn’t even given me a single child. Now she wants a divorce? This is marriage fraud. She scammed us out of the cash gift!” The comments section hurled insults at me. Someone threw dung on our front porch. Someone even edited my family’s faces onto old-fashioned funeral portraits and posted them online. The whole internet said my family deserved to die. What they did not know was that when that money was put into the safe, the whole thing had been caught on camera. The security seals on the cash bundles were covered in Peter’s family’s fingerprints. They also did not know that I had picked up the wrong medical report. The one with cancer was not my father. It was actually Deborah. Later, Peter knelt on the floor begging me to give him some money to save his mother. I kicked his hand away and said coldly, “I still have your counterfeit eighteen thousand dollars. I’ll give it all back to you. Is that enough to cremate your mother?”

I was separated from my family at a young age and was adopted by my adoptive parents, who treated me very well. The day I turned eighteen and became an adult, my biological parents called me and begged me to meet them. Even though I had not seen them for years, I decided to fly to the city where they lived for a meetup. On the day I arrived, I shopped for gifts to give them as a gesture of goodwill, all while waiting for my biological brother to come and pick me up. When I finally picked up the gifts, a young woman decided to take them for herself. “I want the smoking pipe, the tie, and the necklace she’s holding!” She signaled to the shop assistant with a quirk of her lips, and the latter snatched the gift boxes from me. “Hey, I saw them first!” I was furious, but she looked me up and down with a sneer. “All these items are from the most expensive brands in the store. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Can a penniless loser like you afford them? “I am the daughter of the Ferrero family. My older brother is the heir of the Roccia Gang, the city's most powerful gang. Over here, no one dares fight me over things I’ve set my eyes on.” ‘Ferrero? Isn’t that my biological family?’ I thought. As it turned out, she was the girl my parents had adopted after they lost me. I raised an eyebrow and called my older brother, who was coming to pick me up. “Hey, your adopted sister snatched the gifts I bought for you all. What’re you going to do about it?”