By the time I finally shut the bedroom door, the day’s weight crashed down on me all at once. My shoulders sagged, my body ached in places I hadn’t even realized were tense, and my head buzzed like a swarm of angry bees....numbers, files, deadlines, all colliding and tangling until I could hardly separate one thought from the next. But underneath all of that noise was the sharper ache from earlier, the living room, my father’s voice, the way he had looked at me. Not as his daughter. Not as family. But as a wallet. A resource. Something to pull from until it was empty.
The memory made my chest clench.
I blew out a breath, unbuttoned my blazer, and flung it across the chair with more force than necessary. The room was too quiet, unsettlingly so, the kind of silence that didn’t feel like pe
