Chapter 5: Building My Own Gate
A year later, the Calloway mansion was a historic site, open to the public. I stood in the garden, holding a set of blueprints. They were for a youth center—a place for kids from the neighborhood where I’d grown up, a place where no gate could keep them out.
My father stood beside me, watching the construction crews. "Are you happy, Nora?"
I looked at the gate. It was gone. The iron had been melted down and repurposed.
"I am," I said. "I’m not the girl who stood outside waiting to be let in anymore."
I had found my own path. I had turned the anger into an empire of my own, focused on building up the community Margaret had looked down upon. Thomas had moved away, finding a job on his own merit, no longer tethered to his mother's twisted ambition.
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Margaret was living in a small apartment, stripped of the influence she had prized above human connection. She had everything she had wanted—control—and she had lost everything that mattered.
I breathed in the air, crisp and clean. I had been thrown out like a stranger, but that shove had been the best thing that ever happened to me. It had forced me to stand up, to stop looking at the gate, and to start building my own kingdom. And this one? This one had no gates at all.
