approaching me from the back and heard his angry footsteps on the plush carpet. For the first time, I noticed the looks on our guests’ faces: about a third were confused, another third looked horrified, and the final third were actually smiling.
“You’ve sealed both your fates, Alexandra,” my father threatened. “Love dies. Love doesn’t pay bills. Love doesn’t even last forever. You want to throw away the foundation that your mother and I have built for you over love? Security!”
Ethan stepped in front of me.
“I said, security!” my father repeated.
Two men wearing suits and earpieces walked over to us. Ethan turned towards them and each man grabbed one of his arms.
“Let me go,” he ordered.
“Take him out of here,” my father growled.
“Drag me out of here if you want to, but I’m not leaving without my woman,” Ethan asserted. “I didn’t go through all of this to give her up, and I promise you that I’ll never give her up again.”
I turned to my father, but my mother’s voice broke through, more vocal than I’d ever heard it in all the years of my life.
“You want her to have a life like ours, James?” she asked, walking up. “You want her to have a life filled with emptiness and infidelity?”
Grandma Evelyn rose and followed her. The men’s eyes darted between my parents. I shook my head, and they slackened their grip enough for Ethan to shrug out of their grasp.
My father shot my mother an angry glare. “Janice, be quiet.”
“I’m sorry, James, but I can’t stand by and let my daughter make the same mistake that I did when I married you.”
At that admission, I was sure that ninety-percent of the people in attendance gasped. The other ten-percent were children who had no idea what was going on.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Janice,” my father warned. “I gave you a good, comfortable life.”
“And you’re saying that I’ll somehow ruin that?” Ethan jumped in. “Look, I could somewhat justify your opposition to my relationship with Alexandra if I didn’t have anything to my name. But, I have damn more than that. Why are you so against this?”
My father redirected his glare to Ethan. “And what makes you think you have the authority to speak to me?”
“Because you’re a red-blooded human being,” Ethan answered. “That and the fact that I can talk to who the fuck I want to. You think your title makes you better than me? You think you can just shit on whoever you want to because you’ve had a position in the government?”
I could feel the anger flowing through Ethan’s veins like molten lava. My father once again tried to use his looming presence, this time to intimidate Ethan, but Ethan didn’t even remotely budge.
“This, is who you want to be with?” my father asked, pointing at Ethan but looking at me. “This foul-mouthed baboon?”
“So, you would rather that I marry your choice for you,” I answered. “You’d rather I marry someone who explicitly told me that he wouldn’t care if, years into our marriage, I got some action on the side, rather than the man who said he would prefer to give me up rather than be with me without love?”
He grimaced. “Stop saying that word.”
“What? Love?” I asked. “What do you have against it?”
“It’s not real,” he contended. “Alexandra, I laid everything out for you. Roderick would have given you a good life. I know this about him. I don’t know this man, this Ethan Stewart. I can’t vouch for the life he’ll give you. I can’t promise that you won’t show up at the house in the middle of the night crying because he broke your heart.”
My and Gia’s gazes suddenly found each other from across the room and locked. It was as though we’d just unearthed a major discovery: a source of compassion hidden within our father that seemed to be enshrouded in pain.
“Why do you think that will happen?” I asked him.
He turned away and tried to walk past us, but I grabbed his forearm. When he tugged at it and faced me, although he’d never placed a hand on me in his life, I slightly recoiled. Unfortunately, it wasn’t slight enough. Everyone saw it, even the cameras.
He looked up and around the room into the faces of those now convinced that with the way I’d flinched, he’d put his hands on me before. It was as though I could see the pieces of his public image falling off like flakes from