Emily leaned her head back against the seat and looked at the rain-gray sky through the window and thought about the precise moment, years ago, when she had decided not to tell her father that she was seeing Ethan Carter. She had made that decision consciously—she remembered where she was standing when she made it, in her small apartment at the time, looking at her phone with Ethan’s name on the screen—because she had wanted, more than almost anything, to have something that was entirely her own. A life she was building by herself, out of her own choices, without the weight of who her father was sitting on every decision she made. She had grown up in the particular isolation of being Alexander Reed’s daughter, which was not what most people imagined when they heard the name. It was not isolation in the sense of deprivation—there was nothing materially she had lacked. It was the isolation of being known primarily as something adjacent to someone else’s significance. The daughter of. The child of. As though she were a footnote in his story rather than a story in her own right.

She had wanted to write her own.