After my divorce, my ex-husband and his expensive lawyers made sure I lost everything.
“Nobody wants a homeless woman,” he’d said, like it was a prophecy instead of a threat.
Three months later, I was elbow-deep in a dumpster behind a foreclosed mansion, digging through discarded furniture like my architecture degree had been nothing more than a joke I once told myself. The morning air was sharp and cold, the kind of Tuesday that makes the whole world feel too awake. I had one hand wrapped around a vintage chair leg, my fingers black with grime, when a woman in a designer suit stopped a few feet away and looked at me like she’d been expecting to find me right here.
“Excuse me,” she said calmly, “are you Sophia Hartfield?”
I froze. For a heartbeat, all I heard was Richard’s voice in my head—smooth, cruel, satisfied.
Nobody’s going to want a broke, homeless woman like you.
