The lien failed.I want that first, because everyone assumes it held. A mechanic’s lien protects contractors and suppliers who go unpaid. I was neither. I was an owner-occupant who paid every invoice in full, and the trust’s attorney pointed that out in four pages. The court discharged it in June and assessed me eleven hundred dollars in the trust’s filing costs. My own attorney had warned me it was a long shot. I told him to file it anyway because I wanted them to feel something, and feeling something is not a legal theory.

What actually recovered the money was boring. Unjust enrichment, argued over fourteen months, settled at thirty-nine thousand of the fifty-eight. I signed because the litigation was costing me more than the gap. Rosalind’s parents paid it from the trust and the building went on the market in the spring.