Stranded: My Step Uncle’s Secret Obsession

"What the hell were you thinking, Ivy? Why did I just get a call at six o'clock this morning telling me that my daughter has been expelled from a university again?"

My father's voice hit me before I had even fully stepped through the door of his office. I shut it behind me, set my bag down, and looked at him—already on his feet, already past the point where reason was going to be his first language, his face carrying the particular shade of red that meant he had been holding this in since the phone call and was done holding it.

I lifted my chin. "Hello to you too, Dad."

"Don't." He pointed at me across the desk, sharp and certain. "Don't stand there with that face like I am the problem here. Do you have any idea what this morning has been? In the last two years alone, Ivy, you have cost this family over a hundred thousand dollars cleaning up after you—the arrest in Monaco, the incident with the professor's property at your second school, and now this rave that trashed an entire venue and had twelve people in handcuffs, and your dean is on my phone telling me that if I so much as attempt to re-enroll you anywhere near that campus, the board will reject it before it touches a desk. That is where we are. That is what this morning looks like."

"The rave was off-campus," I said. "The university technically had no jurisdiction over what happened—"

"I don't care about jurisdiction!" The words cracked through the room and I watched Camille, sitting in the armchair near the window with her hands folded in her lap, close her eyes briefly. "This is not a courtroom, Ivy, and you are not a lawyer, so stop hiding behind technicalities like they mean something. You threw an illegal rave, forty-three thousand dollars worth of property was destroyed, and twelve people went to jail. That is not a technicality. That is your life. That is what you are doing with it."

"People have fun at raves," I said. "The property damage was an accident—"

"Oh, was it?" He came around the side of the desk, closer now, and his voice dropped into something that cut sharper than the shouting had. "Was the footage from Cannes also an accident? You, on top of a table in a nightclub at two in the morning while half of Europe's press photographers took pictures that my colleagues—men I have worked with for twenty years—were forwarding to me the next morning asking if I had seen what my daughter was doing on holiday. Was that an accident too?"

I said nothing.

"Three universities, Ivy." His voice broke slightly on it, and I hated that it did. "Three schools that would have given you everything. And in every single one of them, you decided that parties and headlines and chaos were more important than your own future. Your first school asked you to leave because you were throwing parties in the dorms every other weekend and your grades had collapsed entirely. Your second school—" he exhaled—"let's not even get fully into what happened at your second school, but the phrase 'significant structural damage' was used by their legal team, and we paid heavily to make sure your name was kept out of that filing. And now this. Three schools, Ivy. What does that tell you about the direction you are heading?"

"Daniel." Camille's voice was quiet and even, and my father straightened.

"It tells me," I said, "that none of those schools were particularly right for me."

The silence that followed that statement was the specific kind that preceded something worse than shouting.

Camille stood. "That is enough of that." She didn't raise her voice, but she didn't need to. "We are not here to go in circles with you, Ivy. We are here because your father and I have made a decision, and you are going to listen to every word of it before you open your mouth."

I looked at her. "Fine."

"You are going to spend six months at Matthias's research facility on Meridian Island in the South Pacific." She held my gaze as she said it, steady and deliberate, watching my face the way someone watches a surface for cracks. "You will work. You will show up and contribute and behave like a person who understands that other people's time has value. You will not create scenes, you will not engineer situations, and you will come back to us at the end of those six months and show us—with something real and concrete, not words—that you are capable of being an adult."

She paused.

"If you refuse, we cut you off. No allowance. No credit cards. No apartment, no connections, no resources of any kind from this family until you have actually earned them back. You will have nothing from us. That is not a threat, Ivy. That is a promise."

The name landed inside me and stayed there, quiet and complicated, while Camille finished speaking.

Matthias.

I kept my expression exactly where I needed it to be.

Matthias Thorne. My step-uncle by the specific technicality of a marriage that had tangled his family tree with mine two decades ago. Forty years old. Dark-haired and relentlessly composed, the kind of man who never raised his voice because he had never needed to, who walked into rooms and immediately became the fixed point everything else oriented around. A billionaire with three companies to his name and a sustainable energy project that every financial publication worth reading had been breathlessly covering for months.

And the man who had stood in front of me on the night of my eighteenth birthday, taken both my hands in his with the most excruciating gentleness, and told me—patiently, carefully, like he was explaining something difficult to someone very young—that what I was feeling wasn't real, that I would understand someday, that he cared about me too much to let me make a mistake.

He had been kind. That was the part I had never been able to get past properly. Not cruelty. Not disgust. Just that terrible, deliberate kindness, as if I were a child who had stumbled and needed steadying before she hurt herself. And then he had stepped out of our lives so completely and efficiently that his absence had its own shape—every family event he didn't come to, every invitation declined, every space where he used to be that now just held air.

"Ivy." My father's voice. "Do you understand what we're telling you?"

"Yes," I said.

"You agree to it?"

"Yes."

"You leave tomorrow morning," Camille said. "Early."

I picked up my bag and walked toward the door.

"Ivy." My father's voice stopped me, and when I turned he was looking at me with something in his face that I hadn't seen in a long time—something older than the anger, something that cost him more. "You need to grow up. You need to start acting right, because this—" he gestured at the space between us—"this is not who you are. It's not who you were. You were the girl who used to sit in this office and ask me questions I couldn't answer, who made her teachers nervous because she was always three steps ahead. That is who you are, Ivy. And since your mother died, you have been—"

"Don't." It came out quieter than I meant it to but it stopped him completely. "Don't you dare bring her into this right now. She has nothing to do with this conversation."

"Ivy—"

"And stop talking to me like you know me as well as you think you do." I held his eyes without flinching. "Because you stopped actually paying attention years ago, and you don't get to use her to make your point." I drew a slow breath. "I will be ready tomorrow."

I walked out before he could say another word.

My childhood bedroom had never really felt like mine—Camille had redecorated it in tasteful, inoffensive neutrals sometime after the wedding and the result was a room that was perfectly pleasant and had absolutely nothing of me in it. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the window for a while. Then I reached into my bag and pulled out my journal—dark-covered, worn at the spine, the one thing I had carried consistently since I was sixteen.

I opened it to a fresh page and began to write.

Okay. So they overreacted. Obviously.

But I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes and I think I've managed to talk myself into something.

Six months on a remote island with Matthias Thorne.

My father thinks he's punishing me. Camille thinks I'll come back quieter and grateful and finally ready to behave like a Laurent daughter is supposed to behave. And for about five minutes after they told me, I thought this was just going to be six months of misery and too much proximity to a man who made it very clear two years ago that he had no interest in what I was offering.

But I am not eighteen anymore. I am not that girl who stood in front of him with every feeling she had right there on the surface, hoping he would just decide to want her back. I was inexperienced and I was obvious and he used both of those things to dismiss me.

He rejected me. He vanished. He treated what I felt like a phase he could simply wait out, and I have spent two years being furious about it in every wrong direction.

So here is what I have decided: I am going to that island with one goal. By the end of six months, Matthias Thorne is going to want me so completely and so helplessly that he won't know what to do with himself. I am going to make him look at me and see exactly what he turned away from. I am going to make him regret every single night he spent convincing himself that walking away was the right thing to do.

He had his chance to handle this with dignity.

He will not stand a chance.