“Draw attention how?”
“Just… you know, he wants everything to be perfect. This is a big deal for him. Lots of his business partners are coming. The Holts, the Reeves family, people from the Arizona Real Estate Association. He’s been planning his speech for weeks.”
I almost laughed. Of course, this was about him.
“How many guests?” I asked.
“Two eighty-seven. Can you believe it? The Grand View Estate can hold four hundred, but we wanted it to feel intimate.” She giggled. “Derek’s family is so impressed. They’ve never been to a venue this nice. The Grand View Estate.”
I kept my voice neutral.
“Sounds beautiful.”
“It really is. Oh, and Dad already arranged the seating. You’re at table fourteen.”
Table fourteen. I’d worked in hospitality long enough to know what that meant: the table furthest from the head table, usually reserved for guests who needed to be present but weren’t important enough to be visible.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
“Really?” Vanessa sounded surprised. “I mean… great. Just remember what Dad said about not wearing anything too—”
“I remember.”
After we hung up, I pulled up the property records for the Grand View Estate on my laptop and smiled at the owner’s name listed there.
Mine.
My mother died when I was fourteen. Ovarian cancer. She fought for eleven months before her body gave out, and I spent most of that year sleeping in hospital chairs, holding her hand while my father attended networking events and my sister practiced for cheerleading tryouts.
Mom left behind two things: a collection of handwritten letters she’d prepared for major moments in my life—graduation, first job, wedding, first child—and $120,000 in life insurance, split evenly between Vanessa and me.
Dad held our portions “for safekeeping.” That’s what he called it. Safekeeping.
Vanessa received her $60,000 on her twenty-first birthday. She used it as a down payment on a condo that Dad helped her find in a building where one of his clients was the developer. Naturally, everyone won except the person who was supposed to inherit the money.
When I turned twenty-one, I asked about my share. My father looked at me over his reading glasses, newspaper in hand.
“You’ll just waste it, Sierra. When you prove you know how to manage money, we’ll talk.”
I was twenty-two when I left Scottsdale with $2,400 in my savings account, a secondhand Honda Civic, and one of my mother’s letters tucked into my wallet—the one labeled When you feel lost.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to become who you’re meant to be, she’d written. But sometimes you’ll need to show them.
I never asked about the $60,000 again. Not because I didn’t need it—those first two years in Las Vegas were brutal, working double shifts at a budget hotel while finishing my degree online—but because I refused to owe my father anything.
Eighteen years later, I still haven’t seen a cent of my mother’s money.
But I built something worth far more than $60,000.
And in three weeks, my father would be standing in the middle of it.
June 14th, 2024, 2:47 p.m.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my Las Vegas penthouse, thirty-four floors above the Strip, and evaluated my reflection. Simple black dress—elegant but understated. Pearl earrings my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday. Minimal makeup, hair pulled back in a low chignon. Nothing flashy. Nothing that would embarrass Vanessa.
My phone buzzed on the dresser. A text from Elena Vance, my CFO and the closest thing I had to a best friend.
Good luck today. Remember, you don’t owe them anything.
I smiled and typed back:
I know. But I need to see this through.
Three dots appeared.
Then if he says anything stupid, just remember you could literally buy his entire client list and still have money left over for a yacht.
