Introduction

The smoky air of the private club was my weekly escape, a poker game with the only family I had left after my life fell apart.

Then a sharp knock on the door, uncharacteristic and unwelcome, shattered the peace.

It was my daughter, Emily, standing there, dressed in expensive clothes that screamed wealth but fit her poorly, her face a mask of impatient demand. "Are you Liam?" she asked, her tone sharp.

The name "Emily" hit me like a physical blow. Not the sweet girl with pigtails I remembered, but a cold stranger who now sneered with her mother' s malicious confidence.

She was getting married, she announced, but her intent wasn't sharing joy. It was a thinly veiled directive, a command for me to be present for the "family's image."

The look of disgust in her eyes, a mirror of my ex-wife Sarah' s, confirmed it. She saw me as a pathetic relic, just as Sarah had poisoned her mind into believing I was an unfit father, a failed businessman, the reason for all their problems.

My heart, long numbed, flickered with a bitter anger. The sheer audacity, the entitlement-it was all Sarah, channeled through the daughter I no longer knew.

"I don't," I told my friends, eyes hard. "Not anymore." But as I said it, a new thought began to form. A wedding was a public affair, a stage. Maybe it was time to collect a debt.