The Daughter He Didn't Defend

Synopsis

At the company's annual awards party, my dad took the stage and handed Katie Warren a fifteen-hundred-thousand-dollar year-end bonus check. Katie held the check and gloated in front of me. "Thanks to you volunteering to step out of the project team, I wouldn't still be an employee making six hundred dollars a month." That was when I realized my dad had, without even telling me, given the multimillion-dollar project I'd worked on for five months to Katie. When I confronted him, my dad avoided my gaze and explained quietly, "Katie's almost thirty. She urgently needs this project to prove herself. "You're my daughter, and to keep employees from saying I'm mixing business and family, I have to avoid any appearance of favoritism." I held my three-hundred-dollar bonus, feeling how hollow it was, and my voice shook. "So, just because I'm your daughter, you gave away the project I worked so hard on for five months?" "Then I won't be your daughter. Can you give my project back to me?"