Chapter 2
Gianna
I made it back to my apartment before the panic fully hit.
The folder sat on my kitchen table where I’d dropped it. Devlin Holdings printed across the top in clean corporate font. I stared at it from across the room like getting too close might set it on fire.
Ten years. I hadn’t seen that name in ten years.
My hands shook. I pressed them flat against the counter and focused on breathing. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. The way the therapist had taught my mother after everything fell apart.
After Devlin Holdings destroyed everything we had.
Ten years ago
The notice appeared on our apartment door on a Tuesday morning in late September.
I’d been running late for my second week at NYU Law. First semester. Finally.
My father was so proud when I got in he took the acceptance letter to work and showed everyone.
He had a copy folded in his wallet, that's how happy he was.
My mother cried happy tears that made me cry too.
We celebrated with Chinese takeout and talked about my future like it was something real and reachable.
I almost missed the notice entirely, would have if my mother hadn’t called my name from the doorway, her voice already thin with worry.
“Gianna. What is this?”
I grabbed the paper from here, and see it.
The Official letterhead. Corporate language. Sixty days to vacate.
The building had been acquired by Devlin Holdings for redevelopment purposes. Tenants were offered relocation assistance that wouldn’t cover first and last month’s rent anywhere else in the city, just a check box on a form to meet their legal obligation.
“It’s a mistake,” I said, reading it twice to make sure I understood. “It has to be.”
But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t. The paper was too official, the language too precise, and this was real.
My mother’s breathing went shallow and fast. I recognized that sound, panic creeping in at the edges.
“Mamá, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
I didn’t know if that was true.
My father came home from his warehouse shift that evening after loading trucks for twelve hours, his shoulders sagging with exhaustion.
I watched him read the notice, watched his face turn into something I’d never seen before.
Not angry, not scared, something worse. Something that looked like defeat wearing determination as a mask.
“I’ll talk to the company,” he said, his voice steady in that way he used when he was terrified but trying not to show it. “There has to be something we can do. We’ve been here eight years, we pay rent on time, they can’t just—”
He didn’t finish because they could. We all knew they could.
Over the next two weeks, I watched my father try everything.
He called the company and got transferred between departments until someone finally hung up on him. He called back, got transferred again, left messages that went unreturned. He spent his lunch breaks on hold, listening to elevator music while his food went cold.
He even took a day off work—something he never did because we couldn’t afford it—and showed up at their corporate offices in Manhattan. He took the train into the city, wore his best shirt, prepared what he was going to say.
Security turned him away before he made it past the lobby. “Sir, you need an appointment.” “Sir, you can’t be here.” “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
He came home that day looking smaller somehow, deflated in a way that hollowed out my chest.
He wrote letters too, formal ones asking for extensions or alternative arrangements or some kind of compromise. He explained that his daughter had just started law school, that his wife had health issues, that they needed time.
Every single one went unanswered.
The deadline didn’t move.
My mother’s panic attacks got worse and she stopped sleeping. I’d wake up at three in the morning and find her in the kitchen, scrubbing counters that were already clean. She stopped eating properly, picking at her food and insisting she wasn’t hungry even though I knew she was.
I’d come home from class and find her pacing the apartment, counting things. The dishes in the cabinet, the books on the shelf, the tiles on the kitchen floor, her lips moving silently as she tallied numbers that didn’t matter.
“Mamá, you need to rest.”
“I can’t,” she said, her hands twisting together. “What if we end up on the street? What if—”
“We won’t. Dad’s handling it.”
But he wasn’t handling it and nobody could. Devlin Holdings had the law on their side and we had nothing, just two months and a deadline that was coming whether we were ready or not.
I started missing classes, not on purpose at first but I’d just lose track of time while calling apartments, trying to find something affordable. Everything required income verification we couldn’t fake or references that would expose we’d been displaced.
Nobody wanted tenants who were already in trouble, nobody wanted to take a risk on a family that was one paycheck away from falling apart.
My professors sent emails asking where I was and I didn’t respond. What was I supposed to say? Sorry, can’t make it to Property Law because I’m trying to prevent my family from becoming homeless?
My father worked extra shifts, doubles when he could get them, trying to save money we didn’t have time to save.
I watched him leave before dawn and come home after dark, exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
His shoulders permanently hunched from lifting boxes, his hands developing tremors he tried to hide.
He looked like he’d aged ten years in three weeks.
“How much do we have?” I asked one night, late, after my mother had finally fallen asleep.
He looked at me with eyes that had given up pretending. “Not enough.”
“How much do we need?”
“More than we can get.”
Three weeks after the notice appeared, my father collapsed in the stairwell.
I was in my room trying to study for a Property Law exam I hadn’t prepared for, and the irony wasn’t lost on me. Learning about tenant rights while my family was being evicted. My textbook was open but the words wouldn’t stick and everything felt distant and unreal.
My mother screamed—a sound I’d never forget.
I ran and my textbook hit the floor.
He was on the fourth-floor landing, clutching his chest, his face gray and his lips tinged blue. My mother stood frozen beside him, hyperventilating, her hands hovering over him like she wanted to help but couldn’t remember how.
“Call 911,” I said.
She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to hear me.
“Mom. Call 911.”
Still nothing. She was somewhere else entirely, lost in panic.
I knelt beside my father and pressed my fingers to his neck to find a pulse. It was there but wrong, too fast and too weak and erratic. His eyes found mine and I saw real fear in them, the kind of fear that makes your stomach drop because you know something terrible is happening.
“It’s okay,” I said, lying through my teeth. “You’re going to be okay.”
His hand gripped mine and squeezed once. I squeezed back, holding on like it might anchor him here.
I called 911 myself with my free hand, gave them the address, and tried to sound calm even though my voice shook.
The operator asked questions I could barely answer.
Was he breathing? Yes. Was he conscious?
Mostly. Did he have chest pain? Yes. History of heart problems? I don’t know, I don’t know anything.
Stay on the line. Help is coming.
The ambulance took seventeen minutes. I counted every second. Kneeling beside my father while my mother rocked back and forth against the wall, whispering prayers in Spanish I hadn’t heard since childhood. Prayers for protection, for mercy, for miracles that never came.
The paramedics moved fast once they arrived, questions fired rapid, vitals checked, loading him onto a stretcher with practiced movements that should have been reassuring but just felt terrifying.
My mother tried to follow, but her legs buckled beneath her. I caught her before she hit the stairs, her whole body trembling like she might shake apart.
“Come on, Mamá. We have to go with him.”
She looked at me like she didn’t recognize me, like I was a stranger whom she wasn’t actually seeing.
We rode in the ambulance because I didn’t trust her to make it otherwise. I held her hand, ice cold despite the heat, and watched the paramedics work on my father. I watched the numbers on the machines, tried to understand what they meant but couldn’t make sense of any of it.
At the hospital, they took him away immediately. Crash cart. Code blue. Words I’d only ever heard on TV. A doctor told us to wait in a room with plastic chairs and fluorescent lights that hummed too loud, that someone would update us soon.
We waited two hours.
My mother sat perfectly still—no tears, no words—staring at the wall like looking away might make something even worse happen.
I filled out paperwork. Insurance information, medical history, next of kin, and my hand shook so badly my writing was barely legible.
When the doctor finally came back, her face told me everything before she said a word. That careful expression, that sympathy.
“I’m very sorry. We did everything we could.”
Massive heart attack. Could’ve happened anytime. Nothing anyone could’ve done.
I knew better.
The stress killed him—day by day, worry by worry. The notice from Devlin Holdings, the deadline he couldn’t meet, the future he couldn’t secure for us. The phone calls that went nowhere, the letters no one answered, the security guard who wouldn’t let him past the lobby.
And then all at once, on a stairwell in a building we were being forced to leave.
My mother didn’t cry. She just stopped, stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped being present. I sat beside her in the hospital waiting room and watched her disappear into somewhere I couldn’t follow.
The funeral happened four days before we had to vacate the apartment.
I planned everything alone. Picked the casket, wrote the obituary, called relatives who couldn’t afford to come, made arrangements with a funeral home that offered payment plans for people like us. People who couldn’t afford to bury their dead the way they deserved.
My mother sat silent through all of it, hollow and unreachable. She attended the funeral in a black dress I’d bought from a thrift store, stood at the graveside without crying, without speaking, without anything.
Twenty-two years old, burying my father while packing up our life and trying to figure out where we’d sleep next week.
People came to the funeral and said things that didn’t help. He’s in a better place. Time heals all wounds. Stay strong. God has a plan.
I wanted to scream at them, wanted to ask where this better place was when we needed him here, wanted to know what plan involved killing a good man who’d worked his entire life and never hurt anyone.
Instead I smiled and said thank you and accepted casseroles we had nowhere to store.
We ended up in a shelter.
The apartment had to be emptied by Friday so I packed everything we owned into boxes and bags. Left most of it in a storage unit we couldn’t afford long-term, took only what we could carry, took my mother to a women’s shelter in the Bronx that had two beds available.
The place smelled like industrial cleaner and quiet despair. Bunk beds lined the walls, communal bathrooms, rules posted everywhere about quiet hours and possession limits and how long you could stay before they moved you along.
My mother had her first full breakdown that night.
Screaming, hyperventilating, clawing at her arms like something was trying to escape beneath her skin.
The shelter staff called an ambulance and they sedated her, kept her overnight for observation, sent her back the next morning with prescriptions we couldn’t afford and recommendations for therapy we definitely couldn’t afford.
I dropped out of law school.
Not officially, I just stopped going. Stopped answering emails from professors asking where I was, stopped checking the student portal, stopped thinking about my future because I didn’t have the luxury of a future when I was trying to keep us both alive in the present.
I got jobs. Waitressing, cleaning offices at night, anything that paid cash and didn’t ask questions. I worked doubles, sometimes triples, slept three hours a night when I slept at all, saved every penny toward getting us out of that shelter and into something permanent.
My mother’s mental health got worse before it got better. Panic attacks became daily occurrences, multiple times a day sometimes, and she developed paranoid episodes. Convinced people were following us, that the walls had cameras, that someone was trying to hurt us.
I learned which phrases calmed her down and which ones triggered her worse. Learned how to talk her through attacks when they hit in public, learned how to function on no sleep and constant fear that I’d wake up one day and she’d be gone too.
Until Hector found us.
My mother was selling flowers on a Manhattan street corner that day.
He bought an orchid, some rare variety his late wife had loved, and asked if she needed work. He had hired her on the spot to be his housekeeper.
Hector Valdez changed our lives with one decision.
He had given us the apartment in Queens, furnished it, paid my mother enough that I could quit two of my three jobs and gave us stability for the first time since our world tore apart.
I blinked and I was back in my apartment, staring at the folder on my table.
Devlin Holdings.
The company that killed my father, the company that shattered my mother’s mind, the company that stole seven years of my life.
And now they were doing it again. Thirty-seven families who probably looked just like mine had, parents working extra shifts, kids trying to finish school, people who thought if they just worked hard enough they’d be okay.
I picked up the folder and opened it.
Read through every page carefully this time. The displacement pattern, the corporate restructuring, the relocation assistance that wouldn’t help anyone.
My hands were steady now, the panic replaced by something colder and clearer.
If Devlin Holdings wanted a fight, I’d give them one.
This time I had the law on my side. This time I knew how to fight back, this time I wouldn’t watch from the sidelines while another family fell apart.
I pulled out my laptop and started taking notes, building a case, finding the weaknesses in their legal strategy.
Revenge felt like clarity: sharp, cold, and long overdue.