Three weeks of work. $200 out of pocket for Canva Pro and stock photography.
I sat on the concrete steps outside our apartment building that evening, holding a bottle of water, staring at the traffic on Riverside Drive.
Marcus came out with a cup of coffee—the good stuff from Denise’s shop, which he’d bought with the last of his tip money from helping her rearrange the back storage.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down. “Your credit score hit 710 last month. The refinance is working.”
He paused.
“Also, remember that woman at the cafe? The one who asked about your food truck campaign for Big Tony’s… Lorraine something. She left her card. Said you should call.”
“Who’s Lorraine?” I said.
“I don’t know yet, but she said your Big Tony’s work was the best local campaign she’d seen in 6 months.”
I took the card, held it between two fingers like it might dissolve.
Lorraine Voss. Marketing consultant. Austin, Texas.
I pinned the $1,750 check from Derek to the kitchen wall with a magnet. Wrote next to it in Sharpie: First real payment, first real lesson.
I didn’t go looking for Meredith’s Instagram. The algorithm found me.
One night in April, sitting cross-legged on the air mattress because we still hadn’t bought a couch, I was scrolling through industry hashtags for hospitality marketing ideas when the app decided I might also enjoy a photo of my sister standing in her new kitchen.
Colonial-style house, four bedrooms, kakotta marble island, brass pendant lights, fresh white subway tile backsplash that probably cost more than my monthly rent.
The caption read: Dream home with my dream man.
The house was in West Hartford, bought with the $250,000 wedding gift as a down payment, plus a mortgage Trent had co-signed. My parents’ investment, appreciating nicely—or so the caption suggested.
I started to close the app, then stopped.
Something was off.
The post had fewer likes than Meredith’s usual content. She had nearly 200,000 followers, mostly patients and lifestyle-adjacent accounts. And buried in the comments, a friend had written, Where’s Trent? Haven’t seen you two together in a while.
Meredith’s reply: He’s busy saving lives!
The exclamation marks were doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I closed the app, opened my laptop, pulled up the pitch email I was drafting for a bed and breakfast in Dripping Springs that needed help with their booking funnel.
Meredith’s kitchen had a six-burner Wolf range. I was sitting at an IKEA LACK table I’d assembled wrong twice. The legs were slightly uneven, so my laptop tilted one degree to the left, always.
Every email I’d sent for 4 months had been written at a slant.
I didn’t know it then, but Meredith’s dream home was already worth $60,000 less than what they had paid for it. The Connecticut housing market had softened, and Trent wasn’t busy saving lives.
He was busy ruining theirs.
May was the month that nearly broke us.
5 months in Austin. The numbers on my banking app read like a countdown.
$1,800 in checking. Rent due in 6 days: $1,100, which left $700 for everything else—groceries, gas, phone bill, the internet we needed to keep freelancing, the Canva Pro subscription I couldn’t cancel without losing access to my client templates.
Then Marcus lost his biggest client.
A fintech startup in San Francisco that had been paying him 4,000 a month for UX work sent a two-line email.
Restructuring our design budget. Effective immediately, we’re pausing all contractor agreements. Thanks for everything.
Thanks for everything. The corporate equivalent of a shrug.
