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.”

I took the ugly jobs because most contractors didn’t want them, which meant the margins were better, and because I genuinely liked the problem-solving. A distressed property was a set of nested problems, and solving them in the right order required the kind of thinking I had been doing since I was a teenager trying to plan a life my father didn’t want me to have.

Over six years, the numbers shifted in ways that would have seemed impossible to the nineteen-year-old sleeping on a couch in Franklinton. Two employees became five. I opened a small office — a rented space with a desk and a whiteboard and a window that faced a parking lot, which was not impressive but which was mine — and treated it with the same care I brought to every project, which is to say I kept it organized, documented everything, and left it cleaner at the end of each day than I found it at the beginning.