Chapter 4

"You knew Vivienne had a filming session today, and you still had to go and mark up her face."

"Rosalind Hartwell, your mother was one of the kindest souls I've ever known. How did she produce something like you? Sometimes I wonder if you're even hers."

"Haven't you done enough damage to your mother already? Now you want to destroy Vivienne too?"

I studied my father's face.

That look of revulsion — I'd been watching it for ten years.

He hadn't always looked at me that way.

When Mom was alive, he loved me. He grieved sometimes that I didn't resemble her the way he wished I did, but he poured himself into being my father all the same.

He named me Rosalind. Said I was Hartwell's most precious jewel.

He bought me beautiful dresses and fine jewelry. On my fifth birthday, he gave me an estate.

When a classmate shoved me on the playground, he was furious — he summoned the child's family to apologize in person and hired three different coaches to teach me self-defense.

"If someone hurts you," he told me, "you hit back. I don't care who it is."

"No matter what happens," he promised, "your father and mother will always have your back."

The man who had made that promise was now standing in front of me, demanding to know why I had hurt *his* Vivienne.

"Go to your room and think about what you've done. You don't leave until I say so."

Not once, through any of it, did he look at the wound on my forehead.

Not once did I find the courage to tell him what the teacher had said.

He wouldn't come to school for me. In all these years, he had only ever attended parents' meetings for Vivienne.

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