The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 15
After that, my life became simple.
Classes, work, and lab projects.
My high school graduation speech was cut into short clips that spread online.
A lot of people started asking why I had gone to California alone.
Some found Ava’s old posts about wanting me to go to a local school with her.
Others took screenshots of her “family dinner” caption from the night of my supposed celebration dinner.
The school forums filled up with discussions about her.
“She wanted someone who got into Westbridge to give up a top cybersecurity program and go to a local community college with her?”
“She didn’t need company. She was just used to everyone making way for her.”
“A protected orphan should be supported by the Family that made the promise, not by another girl giving up her future.”
When my parents went out, people started questioning them, too.
Our neighbors asked about the blatant favoritism and the permission-slip system.
People inside the Ferraro Family were more direct.
“Vincent, if you can’t even protect your own daughter, how can you promise anything to your men’s families?”
“Did Maria really use that five thousand dollars from the education fund?”
An internal meeting my father was supposed to attend was postponed.
The advisors’ reason was simple: get your own house in order first.
I rarely looked at any of it anymore.
I got a new phone number and picked up a side job off campus doing website security maintenance.
The first thing I learned was to be responsible for my own life.
The second was to accept that some people would never put me first.
Once I understood that, I could finally move forward.
A month later, an email from Marco landed in my school inbox.
There was no text in the body of the message.
Only an attachment titled *Family*.
It was a chat log from the private group they had kept for years, the one I was never in.
The group had my father, my mother, Marco, and Ava.
But not me.