And the doubt that had haunted me through the long, isolated months of my pregnancy, the quiet fear that I was throwing my life away by standing up to my family, that I was the fragile disappointment they had always said I was, simply evaporated.

Because I was not throwing my life away.

I was finally, after twenty-eight years, claiming it.

I signed my name cleanly across the bottom line.

The stake they had come to my hospital bed to steal, the last thing they thought they could take from the weak daughter, had just become the instrument through which I would take everything.

Chapter 15 — The Storm Breaks

By eight o’clock the following morning, the storm broke across the entire financial world.