But to understand how I ended up in that parking lot, how I went from a normal American teenager with a roof over his head to a homeless kid digging through trash, I need to take you back to my eighteenth birthday. Back to the day my father threw me out. Back to the moment I learned exactly how little I meant to the people who were supposed to love me.
My name is Nathan Brooks. I was eighteen years old when I became homeless, and eighteen years and nine days old when I discovered I was a millionaire. This is the story of what happened in between, and what came after.
I grew up believing I was unwanted.
Not because anyone said it directly—at least not at first—but because everything in my father’s house made it clear that I didn’t belong there.
My mother died when I was four years old. Cancer. The aggressive kind that takes people quickly.
