“Yes, I am. Shamelessly.”
“Coercion,” she muttered.
“I’m also your father, and for the last five years, I have watched you work endlessly and not take any time for yourself.”
“I’m happy when I’m working.”
“You just have a compulsion to make the world fair and equal.”
“The world will be a better place if it’s fair and equal.”
“I know that, but you can’t single-handedly change the world.”
“I can try.”
“Not to the exclusion of everything else. Margaret, for the past few years you have been an attorney and my daughter. What have you done for yourself?”
“Won my cases.”
He pinned her with one of his direct looks. “Life is passing you by.”
“You make it sound as if I’ve got one foot in the grave.”
He laughed. “You’re thirty-two, and not getting any younger.”
“Thanks.”
“Go. Just go.” He paused. “For me.”
She sat there, torn, because she didn’t want to go on this trip. She’d rather work. There was comfort and safety in the law. It was something she knew well.
But she looked at her dad and knew she was going to lose this argument. She’d go. Because he wanted her to.
Her mother had died when she was barely seven. And that left just the two of them. She did have her maternal uncles, all attorneys and partners in her law firm. They had been there for holidays, there whenever her father thought he needed help parenting, and there when Margaret began to study law.
But in truth, her family was her father. And he was right. She’d go on this trip for him, because he was the single most important person in her life.
So a week later when she walked up the boarding ramp on a large Pacific liner, she did so with resigned acceptance. A number of male heads turned and followed her with their eyes. Something she had also learned to accept.
She understood that men found her attractive, but she felt her looks were a curse. She wanted, needed, to be taken seriously. Her father had always treated her respectfully, as had her uncles. But to others, once the pretty little girl with ribbons in her hair had grown up, she hadn’t become a person, she was a shell, something to ogle.
To the world, there was nothing on the inside of Margaret Smith. There couldn’t be, because she was pretty. She had to earn respect, because most of the world thought a woman who was beautiful had little else to offer.
She couldn’t be intelligent, because she was pretty. She couldn’t have any depth, because she had lovely blond hair. She couldn’t think, because she had money. She couldn’t have a heart, a soul, because she wasn’t like them.
To them, she couldn’t hurt.
She remembered how a college classmate, another woman, had looked at her once and said with vitriol, “How could you know anything about being hurt? You grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth.”
And that was what too many people thought. That Margaret Huntington Smith had everything. No one knew that although she had a loving father and kind, caring uncles, wealth, and beauty, much of the time, deep down inside she felt alone and scared.
She hid her loneliness, her fears, along with those instincts that were female—motherhood, sisterhood, even the occasional urge to cry for no reason. All things that her father couldn’t explain.
With only men as role models, she strived to be strong and independent, capable and focused. She grew up thinking she had to be as perfect as she appeared to the world and, more important, to one person in her life who mattered, her father. Because she was all he had left.
Maybe that’s why she worked so hard to try to make the world fair and equal. Because for Margaret, it never had been.
* * *
