The first person I called after I found out I’d placed in the North American Portrait Society’s huge career-making yearly contest was my dad.

Which is weird. Because I never called my dad.

Not voluntarily, anyway.

Sure, I called on birthdays or Father’s Day or New Year’s—hoping to get lucky and miss him so I could leave a singsongy message like “So sorry to miss you,” get the credit, and be done.

But I called only out of obligation. Never for fun. Never, ever just to talk. And never—god forbid—to share things.

My goal was always not to share things with my father. How broke I was. How I was still—endlessly—failing in my chosen career. How I’d given up on yet another relationship and moved into my not-fit-for-human-habitation art studio because I couldn’t afford a place of my own.

That was all need-to-know information.

And he definitely didn’t need to know.

It gave me some structure, in a way—crafting ongoing fake success stories about myself for him and my evil stepmother, Lucinda. I was always “doing great.” Or “crazy busy.” Or “thriving so much.”

I didn’t actively make things up. I just worked devotedly to obscure the truth.

The truth was, I’d defied all my dad’s instructions eight years before, dropping out of premed and switching my college major to Fine Arts.

“Fine Arts?” my father had said, like he’d never heard the term before. “How exactly are you supposed to make a living with that?”

I gave him a little shrug. “I’m just going to . . . be an artist.”

Wow, those words did not land well.