the years of our marriage, because they’d decided I was ordinary — a woman with no powerful family to answer to, no money of my own that they could see, no recourse. They mistook my silence about my father for a lack of one.
And that mistake let me see them clearly. Because a family that’s cruel to the daughter of a nobody is a family showing you exactly what they are when they think there’s no cost. Every door Gabriel didn’t open, every dismissal, every time Penelope treated me like staff — it was all committed against a woman they believed was powerless, which is the only true test of character there is.
The SUV was mine — my father gave it to me before the wedding, in my name, and Gabriel had simply started driving it because it made him look successful. The apartment was mine too, though Gabriel didn’t fully
