Not emergency funds.
Something more personal.
My Blue Ridge Fund.
I had started it when I was twenty-two.
Every promotion.
Every year-end bonus.
Every tax refund.
A piece of every paycheck.
All toward one thing.
Land.
When I was nine years old, my grandparents had owned a small farm in western Virginia.
Nothing glamorous.
An aging red barn.
Apple trees.
Six chickens.
A vegetable garden that produced far too many tomatoes.
And acres of uneven land where I spent summers running barefoot until my grandmother yelled that I was going to step on a nail.
Then my grandfather got sick.
Medical bills piled up.
The property was sold.
Nobody warned me.
One afternoon, I came home from school and saw cardboard boxes in the kitchen.
Three weeks later, another family owned the farm.
I never forgot it.
As an adult, I promised myself that one day, I would own a place nobody could suddenly take away.
A farmhouse.
A garden.
Maybe chickens.
Enough acreage that I could stand outside in the morning and hear nothing but wind.
By the time I met Marcus, I had saved nearly $180,000.
Then his business began collapsing.
And I chose him.
I transferred almost all of it into his company.
Marcus cried when I told him.
He said he would repay every dollar.
I told him we were building a future together and that there was no difference between his dream and mine anymore.
Looking back, I think that sentence was the reason what happened next hurt so much.
At the reception, Sophie was still talking.
