the envelope was thin, which should have told me everything before I even opened it. A check feels like something in your hand. A single folded sheet of paper does not.
I was standing in the gravel driveway of my new little house on the south side of Muncie, still in my scrubs from a twelve-hour shift on the medical floor, mail in one hand and my house keys, my actual house keys, in the other. I had been a homeowner for eleven days. I tore the envelope open right there because I did not want to wait, because I had been waiting on this money since the day I handed over my old keys, and what I read made me stand so still in that driveway that my neighbor across the street asked me later if I was all right.
Gilby Renfro was keeping my whole deposit. All fourteen hundred dollars of it. Itemized on a single page were charges for carpet stains, a cracked bathroom tile, “excessive wear” on the kitchen cabinets, and a deep clean fee, against a duplex on the near side of campus that I had left cleaner than a surgical tray.
My name is Sanaa. I am twenty-seven years old, I work nights on the medical-surgical floor at the hospital here in Muncie, and I had just spent the better part of a decade learning how to keep my composure when things went sideways in front of me, a flatlining monitor, a family in the hallway falling apart, a doctor barking an order I needed to catch on the first try. I thought I had seen every version of my hands shaking and forced myself steady anyway.
Standing in that driveway, reading Gilby Renfro’s letter, I found out I had one more version left in me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
