“For what it’s worth,” I added, “I never wanted you to feel small. I just wanted to stop feeling small to you. But somehow, all this…” I gestured vaguely at the TV, at the buzzing phones, at the word billion hanging in the air. “All this seems to have reversed things.”
Mom wiped at her eyes. “We’ll do better,” she said. “We’ll… we’ll try.”
“I hope so,” I said. “For your sakes, not mine.”
I walked toward the front hall. My phone buzzed again in my hand. My assistant’s name popped up.
SEC wants to confirm press time. Treasury asking if you’ll take a call. MIT calling again. Also, your lobby is full of cameras.
On the TV, the anchor’s voice followed me down the hallway.
“—still no comment from Chin or her firm, though sources say she’s expected to address the public tomorrow morning at a press conference that could redefine the future of Wall Street…”
I stepped into the cool night air.
The drive back to Manhattan was quiet. I didn’t turn the radio on. Notifications stacked up in silence on my muted phone.
The Honda’s engine hummed, steady and unbothered. Leather worn in just the right places. A car I liked, not a car I picked for anyone else’s approval.
For thirty miles, I replayed dinner in my head.
Their dismissive voices from an hour earlier.
Their stunned silence ten minutes later.
The edge in Mom’s voice when she realized all the times she’d called me “just a stock broker” she’d been talking about the person CNBC was now calling “the most important financial mind of the 21st century.”
I thought about Dad, who measured worth in buildings and years of ownership, trying to reconcile his conservative portfolio with a daughter whose personal net worth was larger than the GDP of some countries.
I thought about Marcus, the golden child, the favorite, the heir-apparent… staring at the offer to become his little sister’s employee.
Tomorrow, there would be cameras. Questions. Analysts hoping I’d drop some magic formula they could sell to their clients.
“Ms. Chin, what’s your edge?”
“Ms. Chin, do you think markets are efficient?”
“Ms. Chin, what does it feel like to be thirty and worth three point two billion dollars?”
It would all be noise.
I had built what I’d built for one reason: because I knew I could.
Not to impress my family. Not to make the anchors breathless. Not even for the money, not really.
I’d done it because the patterns made sense to me in a way nothing else ever had.
And because for seven years, every time my mother said “You’re just a stock broker,” every time my father shook his head and said “At your age I owned three buildings,” every time Marcus patted my hand and said “One day you’ll understand real wealth”—
—I’d smiled.
I’d swallowed it.
And I’d gone back to my screens, my models, my instincts.
You don’t need someone’s belief to be right.
You just have to be right.
By the time I pulled into the underground garage beneath my building—the one CNBC now valued at two hundred million—the press conference had already been scheduled. My legal team had already vetted my talking points. My assistant had already texted me three new offers I’d never dreamed of and would almost certainly decline.
I swiped into the elevator, the doors sliding shut on the world’s noise.
Upstairs, in the penthouse they’d just called “a forty-five-million-dollar monument to quiet taste,” I poured myself a glass of water, not wine, and stepped out onto the balcony.
The skyline glittered. Somewhere out there, college kids were Googling my name. Hedge fund titans were swearing at their TVs. A Treasury official was rehearsing how to ask me to sit on some advisory board without making it sound like they were begging.
And in New Jersey, in a perfectly staged dining room, my parents were probably still sitting at that mahogany table, staring at plates of uneaten salmon, surrounded by all the tangible, physical, brick-and-mortar assets they’d always told me were the only real measure of success.
The only thing that had actually changed in the last hour was what they knew.
Not who I was.
Not what I’d built.
Not the path I’d chosen.
Their belief had always lagged behind my reality. Now, thanks to a red Breaking News banner, it had finally caught up.
Too late to matter.
I took a slow sip of water, watching my reflection blur in the glass.
They’d once said I was “just a stock broker.”
Now Wall Street needed their youngest billionaire.
Funny thing was, I still didn’t feel like either of those labels fit.
I was just Jaime.
A woman who’d taken fifty thousand dollars, a gut instinct for patterns, and seven years of everyone underestimating her…
…and turned it into something the rest of the world finally had to look up and acknowledge.
The money doesn’t change who you are, I thought.
It just changes who can afford to ignore you.
Tomorrow, I’d put on a suit, step in front of the cameras, and answer the questions the world thought it needed to ask.
Tonight, I finished my water, powered my phone all the way down, and walked away from the glass to finally get some sleep.
Whatever they said about me in the morning—legend, anomaly, genius, fluke, threat—would be their problem.
I’d already done the only thing that mattered.
I’d proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’d never needed their permission to win.
THE END
