As for Carson himself, I almost feel sorry for him. Almost. He spent his whole life being told he was special because of his bl*od, that the Rutherford line ran through him like something sacred, that it made him better. And in a single afternoon, in front of everyone who’d ever told him that, he learned it was never true. He isn’t a Rutherford. He never was. The entire foundation of who he believed himself to be dissolved while he sat in a chair and watched.
A kinder man would have found that liberating. A whole person would have realized that he was free now — free of the dynasty, free of the poison, free to just be a man who loved his daughter. But Carson had been so thoroughly built out of that pride that without it, he simply… deflated. The Rutherfords, who worship bl*od above all things, quietly closed ranks and pushed him to the edges of the family. They couldn’t quite disown the man they’d raised, but they could never again look at him as the heir. He got, in the end, exactly the fate he’d tried to inflict on our daughter: judged, and found wanting, by whose bl*od he carried.
