All while my multimillionaire father watched.
Alive.
Breathing.
The betrayal was so immense it felt like drowning—lungs burning, chest tight, no surface in sight.
Yes—my father and I never shared the kind of warm, effortless bond other girls talked about in hushed, envious tones.
There were no bedtime stories read at the edge of my bed, no gentle kisses on scraped knees, no soft reassurances whispered in the dark. But he wasn’t always the monster. At least... not then. Not entirely.
Kneeling on the cold marble floor of the suite, the chill seeping through my knees and into my bones, I found myself clinging to those memories like fragments of glass—sharp, painful, but proof that something real had once existed.
Proof that he hadn’t always been hollow.
I remembered being nine years old, during one of the harshest winters California had seen in years.
The cold had been unnatural, biting, the kind that crept under doors and settled in your lungs.
A vicious flu had torn through the city, and I’d been one of its unlucky victims.
For days I lay trapped in my childhood bed, skin burning, chest rattling with each shallow breath.
Every cough felt like it might split me in two.
I remember my mother—my real mother, before fear and secrets hollowed her out—hovering over me, eyes red-rimmed, hands trembling as she pressed cool cloths to my forehead.
She begged him to call a doctor.
He waved it off at first. “It’s just a bug,” he’d said curtly, already halfway down the hall toward his study. “Kids get sick.”
But that night, as snow lashed against the windows like furious spirits and the house groaned under the weight of the storm, the front door slammed open.
I remember the sound vividly.
Heavy footsteps. The sharp intake of cold air. And then him—standing there in the entryway, coat dusted white with snow, hair damp, cheeks flushed red from the wind.
He was holding a large, awkward box against his chest like it might slip from his grasp at any moment.
He didn’t explain.
He simply carried it into my room, set it down, and began assembling it with rough, efficient movements. A portable nebulizer—the exact model our family doctor had recommended weeks earlier, the one my mother had said we couldn’t afford.
“Here,” he’d muttered gruffly, plugging it in. “Breathe.”
That was it.
No hug. No soft words. But when the machine hummed to life and the medicated mist eased into my lungs, when the crushing tightness finally began to loosen, relief flooded me so powerfully I cried.
And for the first time, as I watched him adjust the tubing with surprising care, I saw him as something other than the distant figure who barked orders and vanished behind locked doors.
For one fragile moment, he had chosen me over everything else.
Then there was my thirteenth birthday.
I’d woken that morning to silence. No balloons. No breakfast waiting downstairs. Just an empty house and the familiar ache of being forgotten.
School had been torture—classmates whispering about parties, comparing gifts, laughing about plans I wasn’t part of. I’d kept my head down all day, counting the hours until I could crawl back into bed and pretend it wasn’t my birthday at all.
