I stood in the center of my room, my father’s ultimatum echoing in my mind like a curse I couldn’t shake. The walls of this house, once a place of safety, of warmth, of childhood dreams, now felt suffocating, like they were closing in on me. They weren’t walls anymore; they were bars. A cage. My future, the one I had worked so hard to build, the one everyone had said was guaranteed was slipping away, not in a single dramatic crash but piece by piece, splinter by splinter. The scholarship ...