I spent my entire childhood being told I didn’t belong. My stepmother Vivian would stare at me across the dinner table in our sprawling colonial house in suburban Ohio, her fork paused mid-air, her voice pitched just loud enough for my father to hear but soft enough to maintain plausible deniability: “It’s strange, isn’t it, William? Candace looks nothing like you.
Not your eyes, not your coloring, nothing at all.”
My sister Alyssa, four years younger and golden-haired where I was dark, would smirk into her napkin and later whisper to her friends during sleepovers I wasn’t invited to join: “She’s probably not even really his daughter. That’s what Mom says when Dad’s not around.”
For eighteen years—from the time Vivian married my father when I was eight until the day I walked out at seventeen with a single suitcase and a one-way bus ticket to Chicago—I believed them. I believed I was the mistake, the reminder of a first marriage that shouldn’t be mentioned, the daughter who didn’t quite fit the perfect family portrait they were trying to paint.
My name is Candace Harper, though I went by Candace Moore professionally for years, using my late mother’s maiden name like a shield. I’m thirty-six years old now, and I work as chief financial officer for a mid-sized consulting firm in Chicago. On paper, I have everything—a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, a salary that would have seemed impossible when I was sleeping on my college roommate’s couch, the respect of colleagues who know me as competent and unflappable.
But there’s one thing I never had: a family that actually wanted me. I found out my father died through an email. Not a phone call from a grieving relative, not a tearful message left on my voicemail, just a formal three-paragraph email from his attorney, Martin Chen, informing me that William Harper had passed away at age sixty-eight and that my presence was requested at the reading of his will in two weeks’ time.
Eighteen years. That’s how long it had been since I’d spoken to anyone from that house, since I’d driven down that tree-lined driveway, since I’d sat at that mahogany dining table where I’d never quite had a place that felt secure. The day I returned, my rental car crunching over the gravel drive, I saw her immediately—Vivian, standing at an upstairs window like a sentinel, watching my arrival with an expression that wasn’t grief but something closer to calculation.
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