Because to him, she was.

It did not matter to Lysander Fairholme, in that moment, that she wore no label and carried no purse and had been introduced as event staff.

He was not looking at any of that.

He was looking at his daughter, thirty years dead and standing in front of him alive, and the sight of her had knocked the most powerful man in Texas to his knees.

Aracely would remember, for the rest of her life, that her father’s first act upon finding her was to make himself lower than she was — and that a room full of people who worshipped status watched the richest man among them prove, without meaning to, how little status had ever been worth.

Chapter 11 — The Floor Disappears