I’m Sophia Hartfield, 32, and I was elbow-deep in a dumpster behind a foreclosed McMansion in a quiet American suburb when a woman in a designer suit approached me. “Excuse me, are you Sophia Hartfield?” she asked. I was holding a vintage chair leg, my hands covered in grime, and my ex-husband’s voice echoed in my head from three months ago: Nobody’s going to want a broke, homeless woman like you.
Yeah. Nothing says “architectural genius” like evaluating trash for resale value at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, behind a bank-owned property with a dead American lawn and a realtor’s lockbox still hanging on the front door.
I climbed out, wiping my hands on my filthy jeans. “That’s me,” I said. “If you’re here to repo something, this chair leg is literally all I own.”
She smiled.
“My name is Victoria Chen. I’m an attorney representing the estate of Theodore Hartfield.”
My heart stopped. Uncle Theodore.
The man who’d raised me in his old Boston townhouse after my parents died, who’d inspired my love for architecture walking me through job sites in hard hats, who’d cut me off when I chose marriage over my career ten years ago. “Your great-uncle passed away six weeks ago,” Victoria continued. “He left you his entire estate.”
Where are you watching from today?
Drop your location in the comments below and hit that like and subscribe button if you’ve ever felt like you hit rock bottom only to have life throw you the most unexpected curveball. You’ll definitely want to stick around for what happened next. Three months ago, I was still middle class.
I had a home in the suburbs, a marriage, and an architecture degree I’d never used. My ex-husband, Richard, made it clear working was “unnecessary.”
“I make enough for both of us,” he’d say, like it was romantic instead of controlling. When I discovered his affair with his secretary, everything crumbled.
The divorce was brutal. Richard had expensive lawyers. I had legal aid and hope.
He got the house, the cars, the savings. I got a suitcase and the knowledge that our prenup was “ironclad,” plus his parting words: “Good luck finding someone who will want damaged goods.”
So I’d been surviving by dumpster diving for furniture in foreclosed neighborhoods, restoring pieces in a cheap storage unit near the interstate and selling them online. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was mine.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
