I didn’t evict them onto the street the next morning. That was the version my family told afterward, but it wasn’t true. The process server delivered a lease termination giving Bianca ninety days, exactly as the law required, along with a statement showing eighteen months of unpaid utilities. Bianca had apparently believed the account was mine because she had convinced herself the house was hers. For three years, she’d lived there under a private lease for a third of the market rent, yet somehow had reached the point of billing me for repairs at the dinner table.

Then I showed them the Birchwood Portfolio. File #4 was Bianca’s house. Files #1 through #9 were the other nine homes on the same block, all purchased quietly over four years through my holding company while my family laughed about my “little nonprofit job” and the car they thought I borrowed. Three years earlier, Bianca had needed a co-signer because of credit problems she never mentioned again. Instead of co-signing, I bought the deed, let her live there, and said nothing. I had listened to the jokes every holiday while secretly owning the roof over her head.