“Dad,” Isabella gasped, her voice fracturing so violently I barely recognized it. “She… she’s annihilated them.”
I sat bolt upright, the blueprints forgotten. “Isabella, take a breath. Talk to me. What’s happened?”
“Mom shredded my cap and gown.” Her breathing was jagged, punctuated by the frantic rhythm of a panic attack. “There are just… strips of blue fabric everywhere. She left a note on my pillow.”
My fingers clamped around the phone until my knuckles turned a ghostly white. “What did the note say, Isabella?”
A heavy silence followed, save for her hitching breath. Then, she whispered the words that would haunt me for years: “It says I’m not her daughter anymore. It calls me a… a failure.”
For a heartbeat, the office ceased to exist. The framed awards, the city skyline through the window, the career I had built from the dirt up—all of it felt like cardboard compared to the sound of my daughter disintegrating on the other end of a cellular signal.
Twenty years of marriage to Candace Mann, and I had foolishly believed I had mapped the deepest trenches of her cruelty. I had spent two decades navigating the minefield of her ego, surviving the frigid silences and the razor-sharp criticisms that she wielded like a scalpel. I had endured her family’s elitism and her obsession with “The Mann Standard.”
But this? This was a demolition of the soul.
“I can’t show up, Dad,” Isabella said, her voice small. “I can’t walk across that stage. I can’t face them. I just want to disappear.”
“Listen to me,” I said, already surging out of my chair and sweeping my keys from the desk. “Do not move. Stay in your room. I am coming to get you, and we are going to that ceremony. Do you understand?”
“But I have nothing to wear—”
“Trust me, kiddo. I have a plan.”
The drive from downtown to the mansion we had once shared took fifteen minutes, but in my mind, it was a journey through twenty years of structural decay. I had met Candace at a charity gala hosted by her father’s real estate empire, back when I was a hungry young architect with a construction foreman’s grit and a head full of dreams. She was stunning, possessing a sharp-witted elegance that seemed tailored into her very marrow.
