Ninety-five thousand dollars.
That number had lived in my head like a prayer.
It was not vacation money. It was not extra. It was not sitting there. It was the runway for Fintra Pro, the personal finance app I had been building at night until my apartment looked less like a home and more like a start-up that had broken into one. Whiteboards leaned against the walls. Sticky notes covered my kitchen cabinets. Graph paper with interface sketches hid under coffee mugs. My laptop carried multiple versions of a prototype that could categorize spending, flag unusual transactions, catch dormant permissions, and warn users before a trusted person became a financial risk.
Ninety-five thousand meant office rent for six months. Legal formation. Insurance. Contractor support. Servers. A tiny marketing budget. Enough breathing room to pitch investors without sounding desperate.
And my parents had used eighty-five thousand of it to buy Courtney a condo.
