A better-raised man might have survived that. Might have realized, sitting in that chair, that he was finally free — that he could stop being a Rutherford and start being a person, start being a father. But the Rutherfords had built Carson too well. They had made him entirely out of the thing he’d just lost, and without it there was frighteningly little left.
I did not pity him enough to stay. A man can be a victim of his upbringing and still be the one who looked at his newborn daughter and called her evidence. Both things are true. Understanding why someone became cruel is not the same as agreeing to be the one they’re cruel to.
The dynasty stood frozen around him, their sacred bl*odline exposed as a story a frightened woman had invented to survive them — and the heir they’d built it on, suddenly, biologically, no one.
