She didn’t say anything to me then.

But three months later, she called me to her apartment and said she needed to show me something very important.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that Christmas dinner—that moment of casual cruelty in front of twenty witnesses—had set something major in motion. Something that would take five years to fully detonate.

After I graduated from a local state university in 2022—not an Ivy League school, never an Ivy—I applied for an entry-level position at Ashford Holdings.

I wanted to prove I could contribute. I wanted to believe the family business could be my path too.

My father agreed to hire me as a basic administrative assistant. The salary was forty-two thousand dollars a year.