The Unwanted Heiress: A Billion-Dollar Reckoning

The day of my SATs, my first step toward freedom, began with a slap.

Our Texas ranch was a river of mud, and the testing center was twenty miles away.

My father, a self-made oil tycoon, didn' t even look up as I begged for fifty dollars.

"Fifty dollars? Do you think money grows on trees, Gabrielle?" he sneered.

Then came the slap, hard and fast, echoing through our cavernous living room.

"Lazy and entitled," he spat, stealing the seventeen dollars I' d painstakingly saved.

He kicked me out into the storm, telling me not to return until I'd learned the value of a dollar.