Emily leaned her head back against the seat and looked at the rain-gray sky through the window and thought about the precise moment, years ago, when she had decided not to tell her father that she was seeing Ethan Carter. She had made that decision consciously—she remembered where she was standing when she made it, in her small apartment at the time, looking at her phone with Ethan’s name on the screen—because she had wanted, more than almost anything, to have something that was entirely her own. A life she was building by herself, out of her own choices, without the weight of who her father was sitting on every decision she made. She had grown up in the particular isolation of being Alexander Reed’s daughter, which was not what most people imagined when they heard the name. It was not isolation in the sense of deprivation—there was nothing materially she had lacked. It was the isolation of being known primarily as something adjacent to someone else’s significance. The daughter of. The child of. As though she were a footnote in his story rather than a story in her own right.
She had wanted to write her own.
And she had, she supposed, looking at the city sliding past the car window. The story she had written had included being a waitress for four years, which she was not ashamed of, and it had included meeting a struggling entrepreneur in a diner and believing in him sincerely and helping him in ways she never spoke of and loving him with real care for a while, and it had included the slow erosion of that care as she discovered that the person she had loved was increasingly a performance wearing the face of someone who had once been real. And it had included sitting in a conference room on a rainy morning and signing her name on a document while keeping her back straight and her voice even and not giving Ethan Carter the satisfaction of her tears.
That was the story she had written.
She thought it was, on balance, one she could respect.
She would need to write what came next with the same care.