Part Two: What Fuel Pain Becomes
The apartment lasted three weeks before the financial reality her parents’ death had revealed became impossible to continue ignoring. Her parents had not been irresponsible people — they had been careful, modest, working-class people who lived within their means. But there had been medical debt from her father’s illness two years earlier, a loan taken against the house to pay it, and the house itself, which had been their largest asset and now needed to be sold through probate in a process that would take months and yield less than expected. The debts, as Jason had correctly stated, transferred.
She called a lawyer about Lily. The lawyer was kind and thorough and ultimately delivered information that felt like a second funeral: Jason had, during a period when Emily was spending most of her time at her father’s hospital bedside and running on four hours of sleep a night, obtained temporary custody documents. The process had been technically legal, the lawyer explained — expedited, given unusual circumstances, on grounds that Emily had not had the capacity to contest at the time because she had not known they were being filed.
“What does that mean for me?” Emily asked.
The lawyer said: fighting it would require sustained legal representation over a period of potentially six to twelve months, with hearings and filings and expert witnesses. It would require money she did not have.
She moved into a single room in a shared house. The room had a window that faced a brick wall and a radiator that worked intermittently and a landlord who communicated primarily through text messages at inconvenient hours. It cost four hundred and eighty dollars a month, which she paid by working double shifts at a diner on the commercial strip two blocks away.
She was good at the diner. She was quick, attentive, good with difficult customers in the way that people are good with difficult customers when they have experience of worse difficulties. The owner, a Greek-American man named Theo who had run the place for twenty years and had a face like a road map of every bad decade, told her after her third week that she was the best waitress he’d had since his daughter, and then became flustered by the comparison and changed the subject, which was the most affectionate thing he was capable of.
She saved everything she could. She was spending almost nothing — she ate at the diner where staff meals were included, she bought nothing new, she had no social life. The savings were small and slow at first. She put them in an account she had opened in only her name, which gave her, in the worst hours, a specific number to look at. A number that was growing, even if slowly, because of her own work.
Her father had taught her bookkeeping. He had sat with her at the kitchen table on Sunday evenings when she was a teenager, walking her through ledgers for a small business he consulted for, explaining the logic of it — how money flowed, how decisions left traces, how a balance sheet told a story if you knew how to read it. She had found it boring at the time and had said so, and he had laughed and said that most useful things were boring at first. She thought about that often now.
She used the hours after her shifts to study. Finance, first — online courses, borrowed library books, a second-hand copy of an introductory real estate investment text that she read until the spine cracked. Then more specific things: property valuation, rental yield calculation, the mechanics of small-scale real estate acquisition. She was systematic about it. She made notes. She made plans that were, at first, entirely theoretical, then less theoretical as the savings account number climbed.
She called Lily when she was allowed to call Lily — a schedule established by the temporary custody arrangement, two calls per week, thirty minutes each. The calls were monitored, she suspected, by the quality of Lily’s pauses before answering questions. Lily said she was fine in the tone of a child who has been told what fine should sound like. She said she missed Emily. She asked when she could come home, and Emily said soon, and meant it, and clung to meaning it.
“I love you more than everything,” Emily told her, every call, at the end.
“More than pizza?” Lily said, and Emily laughed, and Lily laughed, and for thirty seconds the distance between them was manageable.
Two years after the cemetery, Emily made her first property purchase. A two-bedroom unit in a declining neighborhood that had good bones and poor management — the kind of property that required patience and attention and a willingness to do some things yourself, all of which she had in abundance. She renovated it in stages, doing what she could learn and hiring out what she couldn’t, and twelve months later it was rented and generating income and she had enough equity to use as leverage for a second purchase.
By year four, she owned three buildings. She had a property management company registered in her name, with two part-time employees and a software system she had built herself from templates and adapted over months. She had been interviewed once by a regional business magazine — a short piece, a single photograph, a headline about self-made success that made her feel both proud and slightly hollow, because the thing that would have made her fully proud was not here, was not in any photograph, was somewhere two states away pressing her palms against a car window.
She was thirty-five years old and she was, by any external measure, successful. And every morning she woke up and the first thing she thought of was a seven-year-old girl’s hands reaching toward her through the air.
