As I reached the highway, I pulled over for a second. My hands were shaking, and my heart was racing at a hundred miles an hour.
I took my phone and did what I should have done a decade ago.
I blocked them.
I blocked their numbers, their emails, and their social media accounts. I deleted the photos of that house from places where they could reach me.
I removed them from my digital life just as I had removed them from my heart.
I drove back to Lake Geneva, back to Dylan, and back to a house that was finally, truly a home.
I had lost a biological family, but for the first time in my life, I felt like I had found my soul.
It has been six months since that meeting in Madison. The fallout was exactly what I expected.
Through mutual friends, I heard that Carter could not find the money. He lost the house he had been trying to flip, and his family had to move into a rental apartment.
My parents had to push back their retirement plans and take on part-time work to help cover his debts. They tell anyone who will listen that I am a heartless millionaire who abandoned her family in their time of need.
But here in my glass house, the noise does not reach me.
I spend my days working with the Higgins Foundation. I spend my weekends with Dylan’s parents, who still treat me like the daughter they always wanted.
I have started mentoring a girl named Mia, a brilliant fifteen-year-old from a rough neighborhood who has an eye for cinematography that reminds me so much of myself.
Seeing her face light up when she sees her work on a screen is my real return on investment.
Cutting them off was not about being petty. It was about protecting the peace I worked so hard to build.
It was about finally deciding that my value is not determined by people who only see me when I am holding a check.
I blocked all their numbers before I even pulled out of the driveway. Sometimes mutual friends reach out telling me my parents are devastated and just want their daughter back.
But I know what they really miss. They miss the daughter they ignored only after she became useful.
So no, I do not regret giving millions to strangers instead of rescuing the family that left me alone at every moment that mattered.
