The Vance mansion had become a mausoleum of my memory, and my father, Alistair, was its self-appointed curator. He moved through the grand, silent rooms not like a grieving parent, but like a man trying to air out a space that held a persistent, unpleasant odor. My odor. The scent of my defiance, my ambition, my inconvenient existence.
Two days had passed since Julian’s dismissal. Two days of Liam and Seraphina cementing their new reality, their laughter echoing in hallways that had once rung with my mother’s music. I watched them from my cold, impotent perch in the ether, a spectator at my own funeral, a funeral no one had bothered to arrange. They were selecting floral arrangements for the wedding—cascades of white orchids, Seraphina’s favorite—on the very table where I had signed the c
