The day my father laughed at the idea of taking my money was the day I stopped asking him to believe in me.

Chapter 1 / 5

Part 2

The next afternoon, I put on the best white blouse I owned, angled my laptop so Ethan couldn’t see the laundry piled behind the couch, and joined the call ten minutes early.

He appeared exactly on time.

Ethan Cole was in his early forties, with rolled-up sleeves and the relaxed confidence of someone who didn’t need a mahogany desk to prove he was important. He thanked me for the mockups, asked how I had developed them, and then did something my father had almost never done.

He listened.

For nearly an hour.

We talked about contractor behavior, abandoned online carts, support tickets, repeat purchasing, and the problem of designing software for people whose hands might be covered in grease while using it. When I suggested a one-touch reorder feature for common supply bundles, Ethan grabbed a pen.

“That,” he said, “is exactly the kind of thing we miss sitting in conference rooms.”

I laughed. “I’ve spent a lot of time around warehouses.”

“I can tell.”

At the end of the call, he offered me a three-month consulting contract.

The day my father laughed at the idea of taking my money was the day I stopped asking him to believe in me.

Part 2

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The concierge laughed when I told her there was mold in my $850-a-night hotel room. Then she suggested I might have brought the dirty towels and used bandage into the room myself. Twenty minutes later, her general manager came rushing through the lobby, and the smile disappeared from her face.

When my mother told me to die on my little brother’s birthday, I never imagined she would spend the rest of her life wishing she could take those words back.

“Get out! You own nothing!” Daniel Mercer shouted across the living room where their father’s funeral flowers had not yet begun to wilt. “Dad left everything to me, Ethan. The house, the investments, the land—all of it. So stop standing there like you still belong here.”