Part 2
The pounding shook the glass in the front door.
“Sienna, open this door!” my father shouted from the porch. “We need to discuss what you’ve done!”
I stood in the hallway without moving. In my hand was the final legal document confirming what my family had only just found out.
After the funeral, I’d changed my will and revoked every emergency contact tied to them. I removed their names from the family trust Julian and I had set up for Maya and Leo. No one who’d chosen a birthday dinner over their funeral would ever control a dollar, make a medical decision for me, or inherit anything because of my death.
Then I moved the $18.7 million settlement into the child safety foundation.
The money would fund work carrying Maya’s and Leo’s names long after the relatives who’d abandoned them were forgotten.
My father hit the door again.
“You had no right to cut us out without talking to us!”
Through the glass I could see the anger on his face. He wasn’t asking how I’d survived the last six months. He wasn’t asking about the foundation, or the children whose names it carried.
He was demanding an explanation because my decision had finally cost him something.
I stepped closer to the door but left it locked.
For a moment I remembered his voice on the phone — calm, distant, almost bored — as I begged him to stand beside me while I buried my husband and two children.
Then I raised the document, looked him dead in the eye through the glass, and got ready to ask the question he’d spent six months avoiding.
