They called me Mad Max in college.
Not because I was wild.
Not because I partied harder than anyone else—though I did.
They called me that because I was angry.
Always angry.
It clung to me like smoke—tight in my chest, behind my eyes, buried in my fists. It came out in broken pool cues, black eyes, and whiskey-fueled fights in dorm rooms and private lounges.
But what no one ever asked was why I was angry.
They assumed it was ego. Power. Testosterone.
It wasn’t.
It was him.
Richard Carter.
My father.
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Back Then
“You’re a Carter,” he’d say, every time I made a mistake. “We don’t get to be soft. We win, or we disappear.”
I remember being sixteen, my first real crush—a girl named Renee. She wasn’t rich. Wasn’t polished. She worked part-time at the library and smelled like cin
