I open my mouth, but he’s a steamroller.
“I have supported you through every whimsical, boneheaded, half-baked idea you’ve ever had,” his voice a cold, terrifying lash.“I sat by while you wasted four years on that journalism degree—fuckingjournalism—when every door in the industry was open for you. Acting, producing, directing…I could’ve handed you all of that and more on a platter. You could’ve continued to build the Collier legacy. But no, you wanted to scribble stories for peanuts, and fine, I footed the bill anyway.”
He leans closer, his eyes narrowing until they’re just shards of blue ice. “But this? This was not a whim, Annemarie. This was a calculated demolition. Of your future. Of Daniel’s. Of this family’s reputation. Do you have any idea what the press has been like? The calls I’ve had to field? The narrative we’ve had to manage?” He shakes his head, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “We look like fools. You have made usalllook like goddamn fools.”
“Graham—” my mother starts, but he cuts her off with a look.
“Steven Spielberg threatened to pull his funding from my next project.Steven Spielberg, Annemarie. Do you understand what that means? And Daniel—” He gestures toward Daniel, who still isn’t looking at me. “Daniel, who has done nothing but love you and support you and try to build a life with you, was humiliated. Publicly. Do you even care about that at all?”
I swallow hard. My hands are shaking in my lap.
“I care—”
“You care about yourself,” he cuts me off again, waving his hand dismissively. “That’s all you’ve ever cared about. Your feelings. Your needs. Your little rebellion. Well, congratulations, Annemarie. You’ve officially embarrassed this family more than I thought possible.”
The entire table falls silent.
I sit there for a heartbeat, watching the way the candlelight flickers in the condensation of my mother’s glass. My father is staring at me, waiting for me to shrink, to apologize, to offer up some version of “I’m sorry” that he can use to garnish his ego.
He doesn’t realize that while I inherited my mother’s bone structure, I inherited his temper. And right now, I’m not scared. I’m just remarkably, vibrantly angry.
I raise a brow, meeting his icy blue gaze with a steady one of my own. “Am I allowed to speak now?”
He scowls, that deep line between his brows carving deeper, but he doesn’t fire back. I turn to Daniel. His face is carefully blank, a skill he learned from his own parents. “Daniel,” I say, and my voice is surprisingly steady. “I’m sorry. For running out the way I did, and for the silence. I owed you a conversation, at the very least. I know that.”
Daniel’s expression shifts. The stony wall of his jaw relaxes just a fraction, his gray eyes searching mine for the girl he thinks he knows. “Annie, I—”
“But,” I continue, cutting him off before he can get too comfortable. “We both know that we’d checked out on our relationship long before our wedding day. Probably before the engagement even happened.”
“That’s not true,” he says gently, almost convincingly.
I let out a short, disbelieving breath. “Yes, it is. You don’t know anything about me, Daniel. You never cared to. You didn’t want a future with me because you loved me, or because you love the way I think. You wanted a future with Annemarie Collier because of what that name did for you. For your family’s business, for your own standing. It was a merger. A friendly one, but a merger all the same.”
Daniel opens his mouth, his face flushing a dull, embarrassed red, but no words come out. He looks down at his hands, and I see the truth in the way he won’t meet my eyes.
My father lets out a sharp, humorless bark of a laugh. “Oh, for god’s sake. So this is aboutlove?Some fairy-tale bullshit where—”
“It’s my turn to speak,” I cut in, sharper than I meant, but it lands, the words slicing through the lull of the restaurant.
The silence that follows is electric. My father actually recoils an inch, his eyes widening before narrowing into slits. He looks like he’s seeing me for the first time—or at least, seeing the spine I’ve grown since August.
“Not once,” I say, “did you ask if I even wanted that wedding.” I glance at Mom, her fingers tight around her glass. “You either. Neither of you bothered to see what I wanted for my own life, for my future. Hell, to this day, you probably couldn’t tell me if you tried.”
I wave a hand toward Daniel, the gesture loose but pointed. “And you—you didn’t even propose to me, not really. It was all hashed out between our parents, and I was supposed to just nod along and let everyone else steer the ship that is my life.”
Mom jumps in then, her polished edge cracking. “You didn’t turn down the idea of the wedding, Annemarie. At no point in the planning process did you say this was something you didn’t want.”
“What planning process?” I ask, tilting my head. “Oh, the one I wasn’t a part of? Let’s see…I didn’t pick my dress. I didn’t pick the flowers, the invitations, the venue, the cake.” My voice is rising, and I don’t care. I turn fully toward her, my heart hammering against the silk of the dress. “I was suffocating, Mom. Your daughter was drowning right under your nose and you had no idea, because you never truly see me.”
My mother’s face hardens into a mask of pure, aristocratic fury. “How dare you,” she whispers, her voice trembling. “How dare you sit there in a three-thousand-dollar designer dress and imply that I’ve been a bad mother to you! Do you have any idea the opportunities we’ve handed you? The doors we’ve forced open so you wouldn’t have to struggle for a single day of your life?”
She starts listing them off—the private schools, the summer vacations, the connections, the safety nets, college. It’s a ledger of privilege.
“Money,” I finish for her. “You gave me money. And yes, I’m grateful for the education. I’m grateful I never went hungry or worried about a roof over my head. But that’s not the same as being seen. That’s not the same as being loved for who I am instead of who you wanted me to be.”
“That is not fair—”
“You never helped me get ready for a single school dance,” I cut in, the memory sharp and clear. “Not one. You missed every parent-teacher conference after the third grade. You forgot my twenty-first birthday entirely. You’ve never read a single article I’ve written, and the only people in the audience for my high school graduation were Eileen and George.”
