Aria felt like she'd been flayed open, one thin cut at a time. She'd always assumed, no matter what, that her father would take her side. That assumption had held steady through every scraped knee, every school suspension, every petty cruelty she'd ever inflicted on someone else — until tonight.
She remembered being a child, newly living with him after his divorce from Alex's mother, and how reliably he'd sided with her against Alex over anything — punishing Alex for things Aria herself had started, every single time. Watching him praise Alex so openly now, in front of everyone, and then question whether Aria was even his daughter, was more than she could absorb in one sitting.
Nothing in her life had prepared her for a day like this one. Her mother's public embarrassment, her brother blaming her for a scheme he'd happily profited from, and now her father calling her legitimacy into question — it was, without exaggeration, the worst day she'd ever lived through.
