You are destroying your father’s health! I stared at the screen for a long second, my thumb hovering over the glass.

Two days earlier, that same woman had stood over my hospital bed, hours after I gave birth, and declared my newborn son a nameless disgrace.

She had stood beside my father while he offered me a petty monthly allowance to buy my silence and my shares, utterly unconcerned with whether I had a roof over my head or food on my table, whether her grandson was healthy, whether I was in pain.

And now, with the golden son in a cell and the empire collapsing, she was texting me about family, about my father’s health, about my obligations, deploying every lever of guilt she had used on me my whole life.