Not love. Not warmth. Not the kind of embrace that made a child feel safe in her own home. She had stopped hoping for that years ago, somewhere between her mother’s sharpened silences and her father’s polite, bloodless nods from the far end of the dinner table in their Upper East Side townhouse.
Forgiveness seemed more realistic.
If she graduated near the top of her class, maybe they would stop comparing her to her younger sister.
If she built a career in Manhattan without using the Jenkins name, maybe they would admit she had value.
If she became the kind of woman who could sit across from CEOs and make men twice her age rethink billion-dollar strategies, maybe her parents would finally look at her as something other than the inconvenient daughter they tolerated because appearances required it.
At thirty-four, Melissa had become everything the city rewarded: disciplined, elegant, frighteningly competent. She was a senior strategy director at a private consulting firm in Midtown, the sort of woman who could walk into a glass boardroom at 8:00 a.m. and leave by noon with an acquisition plan, three backup models, and a quiet warning that saved companies from burning tens of millions of dollars.
She had earned every inch of it.
