ife that had been stolen from her. Tiara began spending entire afternoons there o

f. Her father's old journals - notebooks filled with business thoughts and personal reflections she'd found in a dusty corner - were placed beside

ades-long diary, following her journey from a young girl questioning h

ge entries were th

t thing isn't to never be afraid-it's to do the thing you're afraid of anyway. Today I told my parents I wanted to study fas

distinctly her mother's-the same mix of vulnerability an

with parenthood, with disappointment. One of them included

t me water and sat with me. She said, "This part is hard, but it doesn't last. The hard parts never do. They just teach you how st

. Her mother had questioned whether she could survive. And yet she had. She had buil

~

g letters - not in her diary, but separate, formal letters addressed to her paren

r D

wrote about the first deal you made, the fear you felt, and how you overcame it by remembering that e

alive. I'm failing to believe that anything good waits for me, but maybe I'm learning some

re than I thought it was

rli

ut the diary, about feeling

r M

oday I read about the day you and Daddy met. You wrote, "He looked at me like I was worth something. Like my opinions m

. But when I read your words, I feel seen by you-by the version of you

value, with potential, with a story that matters. It's harder than

en now. Even f

o her future self-a practice that

r T

ourteen and the path is not so clear yet. But I need you to know: it was worth surviving for. Every humiliation, eve

ng you that you're worthless. I hope you've learned to hear

I hope you understand what Daddy m

nary. You just have to surviv

~

r mother's wedding dress, yellowed but still beautiful. Her father's first business award, given whe

long-ago family quarrel. Love letters from her parents to each other, hidden away but never destroyed

perfect memories she'd constructed in her grief. They were comple

both wanted h

her. Their love for her existed in this dust-filled attic, in the ink-stained pages of t

~

ected books from neighbors, borrowed from the small library in the city, smuggled home anything she could find. Her reading had bec

ngs. She drew the lemon tree from memory. She drew her parents' faces from photographs. She d

, activists. She studied how they had overcome obstacles, what they had done d

o power. She wrote a short story about a girl born to servants who became a queen. She wrote a poem about trees t

~

her former life and the records of her current one. She thought about the girl she had b

tead, there was a new Tiara emerging-Tiara the Observer, Tiara the Documenter, Tiara the Plan

w page in her d

son. It's my schoolroom. I'm learning lessons

tremendous cruelty-and that cruelty sa

keep certain people down-and that the o

a teacher, if you let it b

my survival is a

t a burden, not an orphan to be tolerated. I am Tiara Gold. My father was a builder. M

it yet. But on

ind her, Tiara felt something shift. It was small, almost imperceptible-but it was real. I

s work. Now it was ti