I was elbow-deep in a dumpster behind a foreclosed house in suburban Chicago when a woman in a tailored charcoal suit approached me like she’d stepped out of a magazine and into my nightmare. The morning sun caught the brass hardware on her leather briefcase, making it gleam in a way that felt almost mocking given my current circumstances—namely, evaluating trash for resale value at seven in the morning on a Tuesday. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice cultured and careful.
“Are you Sophia Hartfield?”
I was holding a vintage chair leg, my hands covered in grime that had worked its way under my fingernails and into the creases of my palms.
My ex-husband’s parting words from three months ago echoed in my head like a curse I couldn’t shake: “Nobody’s going to want a broke, homeless woman like you.”
Yeah. Nothing says “architectural genius” quite like dumpster diving for furniture you can restore and sell online just to afford another week at the economy motel off the interstate.
I climbed out of the dumpster with as much dignity as one can muster under such circumstances, wiping my hands on jeans that had seen better days. “That’s me,” I said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of my voice.
“If you’re here to repossess something, this chair leg is literally all I own at the moment.”
The woman’s expression didn’t change—no pity, no judgment, just professional composure.
“My name is Victoria Chen,” she said, extending a hand that I was too dirty to shake. “I’m an attorney representing the estate of Theodore Hartfield.”
My heart stopped. The chair leg slipped from my fingers and clattered against the pavement.
Uncle Theodore.
The man who’d raised me after my parents died in a car accident on an icy Massachusetts highway when I was fifteen. The man who’d walked me through construction sites in oversized hard hats, teaching me to see buildings as living things with bones and breath.
The man who’d paid for my architecture degree at a good university, who’d believed in my talent with a fierceness that had sustained me through grief and adolescence. The man who’d cut me off completely when I’d chosen marriage over my career ten years ago, and who’d refused to speak to me ever since despite my Christmas cards and birthday calls.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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