“She will be,” I snapped, raising my voice over his. “When the time is right, when Mia says it’s right, and when Lily understands what a judge’s gavel means.

But in every way that matters to me, she is my daughter.”

My father weaponized his silence. All my life I’d been conditioned to fear that exact quiet—a silence that filled rooms and suffocated the oxygen. When I was seventeen and dared to say I wanted to study architecture instead of inheriting his firm, that silence had lasted three days.

I’d folded, changing my major just to make the coldness stop.

But standing in the Savannah heat, his silence felt powerless. I had a kingdom on the other side of the glass.

Finally, he spat the venom. “You embarrassed us.”