POV Emilia
Turns out, vanishing from your own life is surprisingly easy when you’ve got unlimited funds and zero fucks left to give.
I decline every call from Adrian—seventeen and counting—ignore Dad’s increasingly frantic voicemails, and ghost every business obligation like I’m some kind of corporate Houdini. Board meetings I was supposed to attend, charity luncheons where I was meant to smile and write checks, even my standing appointment with the family lawyer who probably has documents for me to sign. All of it gets the digital equivalent of a middle finger.
Melanie takes over my phone because apparently I can’t be trusted not to throw it in the ocean, which is probably accurate. Day two, I caught myself holding it over the deck railing, genuinely considering whether the satisfying splash would be worth losing my entire contact list.
“What do you want me to tell them?” she asks on day three, scrolling through missed calls like she’s reading war casualties.
“Tell them I’m dead. Tell them I joined a cult. Tell them anything that isn’t the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That I’m too fucking tired to be anyone’s chess piece anymore.”
She doesn’t push, just keeps fielding texts and dodging questions while I hide out in Mom’s beach house like some kind of trust fund hermit.
The house still smells like her perfume after all these years—Chanel and sea salt and something indefinably sad. I try losing myself in painting because that’s what tortured rich girls do, right? Splash acrylic around until the trauma transforms into art?
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.
Neither does cooking. I spend three days making elaborate meals for one, filling the kitHicks with rosemary and garlic and the kind of domestic chaos that’s supposed to be therapeutic. All it does is remind me that I’m alone in a house designed for a family that imploded when I was nine.
The storm inside my head keeps raging no matter how many seascapes I paint or how perfectly I julienne vegetables. Some wounds don’t heal just because you throw money and organic produce at them.
A week in, Melanie shows up unannounced with groceries and a look that says she’s done enabling my disappearing act.
“You can’t just vanish,” she says, setting sourdough on the counter like she’s delivering an ultimatum. “Everyone’s talking. Adrian, your dad, the board. They’re calling it everything from a nervous breakdown to a publicity stunt.”
“Let them talk.” I’m elbow-deep in paint water, trying to make the ocean on canvas look less like a toddler’s finger painting. “I need time. Space. An escape from the fucking chessboard they’ve strapped me to.”
“For how long? Forever?”
“Maybe. What’s the point of going back? So they can auction me off to the next highest bidder?”
Melanie doesn’t argue, just makes tea and sits with me while the conversation dissolves into the sound of waves hitting rocks. That’s why I love her—she knows when to push and when to just exist in the same space as my chaos.
It’s not until two days later that the outside world finally breaches my isolation.
Dad’s assistant—Wilson, looking pale as Dover cliffs—shows up at the door like Death’s personal messenger. He’s got that look people get when they’re carrying news that’s going to detonate your world.
“Miss Thorne.” He presses a folded note into my hands with fingers that shake slightly. “Your father insisted.”
The handwriting’s barely legible, ink smudged in places like tears hit the paper: Please come. It’s not about business. It’s about me.
For the first time in weeks, my breath actually catches. The note feels heavier than it should, weighted with implications I don’t want to process.
“How bad?” I ask Wilson, but his face already tells the story—jaw tight, tie crooked, eyes skittering off mine.
“Very,” he says, and the word lands like a shut door. He rubs a thumb over his wedding band, adds, “They’ve moved him back to intensive. Stable, for now.” He doesn’t say the rest, but I hear it anyway—in the breath he doesn’t take. We move.
Within an hour I’m back in the city, back in the sterile luxury of private hospital wings, back in the world I tried so hard to escape. The machines are different this time—more of them, beeping with more urgency. Dad looks like he’s been carved from paper, all sharp angles and translucent skin.
But his eyes are still sharp, still calculating. Still Dad.
“Just listen,” he says, voice hoarse but absolutely fucking insistent.
And despite everything—the manipulation, the arranged marriage, the years of being managed like corporate property—I sit down in that expensive chair and wait for him to explain why he thinks he deserves my attention.
Because that’s the thing about family. Even when they’re the reason you’re running, they’re still the reason you come back.
Even when you hate them for it.