I felt my blood run cold. Docile? Orphan? My father was an engineer, yes, but not just any kind. He was the head of design at Kinetic Designs LLC, a defense industry firm, a modest man who never boasted about his position. The apartment in that old building actually belonged to my late aunt Clara, and my father kept it for sentimental reasons because he’d grown up there. In reality, we lived in a spacious three-bedroom condo in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. I simply hadn’t felt the need to flaunt any of that to my future mother-in-law.