I watched my father throw my clothes, my books, and the last photo of my mother into the fire like my life meant nothing. Then he looked at me and said, “This is what happens when you disobey me.” I said nothing. Six years later, I called him and whispered, “Check your mailbox.”

What I kept returning to, in the moments when the numbers looked discouraging and the voice in my head that sounded like my father said I’d been wrong to try this, was something simple: I was here. I had gotten out. Every problem I was dealing with was a problem I was dealing with on my own terms, in my own life, building something that belonged to me. That was not nothing. That was, in fact, the whole point.

I built credit carefully, learned how county tax auctions worked, learned to read the assessor’s database the way I read blueprints, learned to recognize in public records the specific pattern of a property approaching the end of its owner’s ability to hold on to it.

Two missed tax payments. A second mortgage taken out two years after the first. Property maintenance costs deferred for a season, then two seasons, then until the systems started failing and the deferred costs became emergency costs that were larger and harder to cover. It was a pattern I had seen many times in the distressed inventory Paul sent me. I had learned to read it at a professional distance.