I saw Mrs. Gable crying by the mailboxes.

Greg drove right past in his golf cart. He didn’t even look.

The ladies at the pool still defended Greg.

“He’s just cleaning up the building,” they told me. “He is doing the tough work.”

This made my blood boil.

They didn’t know the truth.

To the world, we were living the Florida retirement dream.

Inside, we were suffocating.

I wore my bright sundresses, but neither of us cared anymore.

I bought fresh oranges from the market, but they just sat there and went bad.

We sat on the balcony, but we couldn’t enjoy the view anymore.

Not when the sun rose.

Not when the bay was blue.

When our daughter called from Cleveland, we lied to her. We told her Florida was beautiful and we were doing great.

Every morning, I looked at the yellow folder on the kitchen counter. It held our marriage certificate, our savings logs, and the deed to a home we were about to lose.

Arthur spent his evenings in the master closet, messing with the old router and wires the seller had left behind.

He just needed to keep his mechanic’s hands busy so he wouldn’t lose his mind.

The breakthrough happened on a rainy Tuesday morning.

My yellow folder was sitting on the kitchen table next to our old Dell laptop.

Arthur was cleaning out the top shelf of the closet. The previous owner, Vance, had installed some fancy smart-home hub for the thermostat.

Vance said he cleared everything out, but Arthur noticed a small black box tucked behind the router. It was a portable backup hard drive that Vance had forgotten. Arthur brought it to the kitchen table.

He plugged it into our old Dell laptop.

The drive wasn’t even password-protected.

It had all of Vance’s tax files, photos, and emails from the last 5 years.

Arthur clicked on a folder labeled “Condo Sale” and my heart started racing.