She took a breath. “And Dad—I want to acknowledge something.”
He waited.
“I know part of why you came to that meeting was to protect me. And I’m not—I’m grateful. I will always be grateful. But part of what I’ve been thinking about this week is that I spent two years in a situation where I made myself small in order to hold something together that was never going to hold. And I don’t want to do that again. Not in anything. Not even—” she paused, “—not even with us. I love you. You know that. But I need to do this as myself. As someone who earned it.”
A pause.
“Emily,” her father said, and his voice had shifted into the register she associated with the moments that mattered most to him, the ones where the considerable force of his personality quieted into something simpler and more honest. “You have always been someone who earned things. Every single thing. I have watched you earn your way through a life that could have been handed to you, and instead you picked it up yourself and carried it. I have never—” he stopped. Started again. “I have never been prouder of anything in my life than I am of who you are. Not of anything I built. Not of any deal I closed. You.”