My parents tossed my wedding invitation straight into the trash and told me not to embarrass myself, but the morning they saw me walking alone down the aisle at a $40 million Malibu estate, with cameras catching every second, they finally understood the daughter they treated like an afterthought had built a life too big for them to ignore.

Graduated 2019, summa cum laude. No one came. I rented a gown, walked across the stage, shook the dean’s hand, and took a selfie in the parking lot with my cap tilted because I couldn’t get it to sit straight. Then I went to Target and bought a six-inch steel T-square — the good kind, the kind that costs forty dollars and lasts a lifetime — and I held it in the bag on the bus ride home and thought: this is my diploma. The real one. The one I bought for myself.

I called home on holidays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Mother’s Day. My father’s birthday. My mother would talk about Shelby — Shelby’s pregnancy, Shelby’s new kitchen, the funny thing Levi said at church. I’d listen. Sometimes I’d try to tell her about a project — we were reinforcing a 1920s theater in Silver Lake, beautiful old bones, and I was proud of the solution we’d found — and she’d say that’s nice, honey, the way you say that’s nice to a child showing you a crayon drawing, and then Shelby would call on the other line.

My father and I exchanged weather reports like two strangers waiting for the same bus.

Hot out there?

Yep.

Hot here too.

Three years of this.

Then I met James.