I Came Back From Work To See A “SOLD” Sign On My House. You Don’t Need A Luxury Home…
My name is Audriana Blake. I’m twenty‑eight years old, and I’m a structural engineer.
I’m used to pressure, chaos, deadlines that crush twenty people into one. I spend more time on dusty job sites than in my own bed. Steel, concrete, load calculations, seismic codes—those are the things that usually keep my brain humming.
But my house, that was the one thing that made my life feel stable. A place that smelled like quiet after long days. Fresh coffee on Saturday mornings.
Laundry tumbling in the dryer while I sat on the couch sketching blueprints. That house wasn’t just a building. It was the life I built for myself.
Or so I thought. Because today, my house no longer belongs to me. To understand how insane that sentence is, you need to know where I came from.
My dad died when I was twelve. Heart attack on a Tuesday morning, right after he kissed my forehead and told me not to forget my math homework. One minute he was there, joking about how I’d probably end up building bridges or blowing them up in movies, and the next minute he was gone.
The house we lived in back then was small and creaky, but it was ours. After he died, every corner of it became a shrine. My mom, Laura, tried to hold everything together.
She worked double shifts, took night classes, smiled with her mouth while her eyes stayed tired. For a while, it was just the two of us against the world. Then, when I was sixteen, she met Richard.
Richard Marshall showed up in a pressed shirt, expensive watch, and a laugh that sounded like it came with a price tag. He sold insurance. He knew how to talk, how to charm, how to make people feel like they were lucky to be in his orbit.
My mom fell hard. I didn’t. He called me “kiddo” from day one.
Not in a warm way. In a way that said, You’re a problem I’m tolerating. By the time I was eighteen, they were married.
We moved into his house in the suburbs, with granite countertops and a mortgage my mom couldn’t have qualified for on her own. He liked to remind us of that. Anything good in our lives, he somehow made it trace back to him.
So when I graduated college, when I passed the licensing exams, when I landed a job at a big engineering firm and saved every spare dollar, buying my own house became more than a financial goal. It was a declaration. This is mine.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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