Anya looked at this man who she had tried and failed to please for her entire life. This man whose expectations sat so heavily upon her that she had found a dungeon preferable to the weight of them.
She knew she favored her mother in looks, but she had always imagined that there were similarities between her and her father anyway. Not his famous hands, maybe. Not his drive. But certain expressions. The color of their eyes.
But today she looked at him and saw a stranger.
No, she corrected herself.Not quite a stranger. Something worse than that.
A father who had made himself a stranger to his only child. By choice.
“Your disappointment has nothing to do with me,” she said, with a quiet force she knew her father did not miss. “I can’t help you with it or save you from it.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her stepmother, fluttering as ever as she murmured something to Preston.
“For God’s sake,” her father snapped at her. “Just stand still, Charisma.”
“She’s not your lapdog, Dad.” Anya shook her head at him. “I know you like to think she’s stupid, but she’s not. She knows exactly how to handle you, which is an art I certainly failed to master. You’re lucky to have her.”
“I’ll thank you to keep your opinions about my marriage to yourself,” her father barked.
Though next to him, Charisma blinked. Then smiled.
Anya smoothed her hands over the front of her dress, because it made her think of her wedding and the life she would live here, far away from her father’s toxic disappointment. “I thought we were commenting on marriages today. Isn’t that what you came to do? Tell me your opinions about the man I’m marrying in a few hours? Or did you miss that I’m standing here in a bridal gown?”
“I would advise you not to speak to me in such a disrespectful manner, Anya.”
“Or what?” It was a genuine question. “I’m not a small child you can spank. Or one of your surgical residents or nurses you can bully. You’re standing in a palace that is to be my home, in a kingdom I am to be Queen of in a few hours. Really, Dad. What do you plan to do to me if I don’t obey you?”
“I’m your father,” Preston thundered at her.
“And I’m your daughter.” Anya felt the swell of something inside her, bigger than a wave. It crashed over her, into her, and she couldn’t tell if it was drowning her or drawing her out to sea. But she found she didn’t have it in her to care. “I’m your daughter and you treat me a lot worse than a lapdog. I’ve spent my whole life trying to make you proud of me, but I realize now that it’s impossible. No one can make you happy, Dad. No one. You don’t have it in you. And that has to do with you, not me. I can’t make you a different man. What I can do is stop pretending that I’m someone I’m not when you don’t even appreciate the effort.”
She had been afraid of saying something like that her whole life. And now she had, and she didn’t feel a burst of freedom and joy, the way she’d thought she would. Instead, she found she felt sad. Not for herself, but for him. For the relationship they’d never had.
“I have no idea what you mean,” he was raging at her. “You had every opportunity to do the right thing and you squandered it, each and every time. That’s on you, Anya.”
And Anya was already swimming far from land. This was already happening. Last night there had been too many stars to count, and here was her father, determined to ruin it.
She lifted her hands, then dropped them. Not a surrender, because it felt too...right.
Too long overdue.
“I don’t want to be a doctor,” she told him, the words she’d never dared say out loud falling from her lips as if it had always been easy to say them. As if she should have long ago. Because there was no sadness in this. There was only truth. “I never did.”
Charisma actually gasped.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her father snapped. “You have obviously let this awful place get to you. You need help, Anya. Psychological help. You’ve always been far too emotional and your ordeal has clearly put you over the edge.”
What struck her then wasn’t the dismissive tone her father used. Anya was used to that. It wasn’t the contemptuous look on his face, because, of course, she was familiar with that, too.
But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been the night she’d gotten arrested. Those eight months had changed her.
Yet she still paused for a moment, tried to look inside herself, to see if anything that he said had merit. After all, hadn’t she wondered if she was suffering from some kind of psychiatric issue? Hadn’t she made little jokes to herself—and her friends once she’d started using her mobile again—about Stockholm syndrome?
No, came a voice from inside her, deep and certain and undeniably her own.That’s your father talking. You know what you feel. You always have.
“It doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life,” she said quietly. “In the end, it’s really very simple. You either love me, Dad—or you don’t.”
And then she waited. She didn’t look past him to the closed door with the palace staff waiting on the other side. Guests and soon-to-be in-laws celebrating as her own father couldn’t. She didn’t look at her stepmother, who was still standing at Preston’s side. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t look away.