It started with a phone call on a quiet morning — the kind where sunlight warms the kitchen table and you let yourself believe that life might finally be opening up. For fifteen years, my world revolved around my flower shop, Bloom & Blossom: pre-dawn trips to the market, late nights prepping for weddings, holidays spent crafting arrangements for parties I never attended. Selling the shop was hard, but it felt like the right step. I wanted a life that didn’t revolve entirely around work. Maybe I’d travel. Maybe go back to school. Maybe just breathe for once.

The money from the sale wasn’t life-changing, but it was the most I’d ever had at once. Enough to give me choices. Enough to dream. I was sitting at my kitchen table, coffee cooling beside me, when my sister Lisa called. Her voice carried a tension I recognized instantly.

“Ivy… can I come over? Please.”

Twenty minutes later, she was standing in my kitchen, gripping a mug she never drank from. Her hair was unwashed, her nails chewed down, her knee bouncing nonstop. There was no warm-up, no small talk.

“We’re losing the house.”

She spilled everything in short, shaky sentences. Rick’s construction business was falling apart. Debts piling up. The mortgage company closing in. They’d already tried his parents — still not enough. They were out of options.