When the real estate market crashes, a successful agent loses everything and has to start over - with no marketable skills.

SYNOPSIS:

Christine "CeeCee" Cavenaugh is a forty-year-old real estate agent who has spent sixteen successful years at Maxwell Realty, earning a place in the prestigious Century Club four times over. When her broker, Bill Maxwell, closes the firm amid the economic downturn, CeeCee finds herself suddenly unemployed — and wholly unprepared for life outside the industry that defined her.

What follows is a systematic unraveling of the comfortable life she built. Her unemployment benefits barely cover a fraction of her mortgage. Her savings evaporate. Her credit cards declined at the grocery store. A disinterested boyfriend, Arthur, proves useless in her hour of need. She pawns her grandfather's pistol, sells her beloved red Mercedes convertible, surrenders her townhouse to the bank via deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, and moves into a modest apartment on the south side of the city. Along the way, she cycles through a bruising string of jobs — telemarketing, hotel housekeeping, furniture sales, waitressing — each one ending in failure, frustration, or humiliation.

A late-night phone call from Bill pulls her back from the edge of despair. He connects her with his brother's construction company, landing CeeCee a job as a flag-person on a highway paving crew — unglamorous work that she accepts without complaint. She also takes a position as a part-time greeter and cashier at MegaMart, where she meets Pearl Washington, a former nurse and recovering opioid addict who lives at the local women's shelter. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, the two women form an unlikely and genuine friendship. When Pearl is forced out of the shelter to make room for an abused mother with two children, CeeCee invites her to share her apartment.

Bill soon recruits CeeCee to help manage and clean out bank-owned foreclosure properties — REOs — giving her a toehold back in the world she knows. Through this work, she repeatedly crosses paths with Officer Pete Garrison, a widowed single father who first appeared in her life as the cop who ticketed her six months earlier. Their encounters — at foreclosure sites, at the homeless shelter where Pete and his daughter Lou volunteer, and eventually in Pete's living room over pizza and a horror movie — slowly grow into something tender and real.

CeeCee also begins volunteering at the shelter run by Gracie Wilson, a two-time cancer survivor who has dedicated her life to housing abused women, recovering addicts, and homeless youth. One morning before work, CeeCee spots a young undocumented woman, Maria, living in a car with her eight-year-old son Jamie, fleeing an abusive partner. Without hesitation, she arranges safe housing for them at the shelter. In that same moment, Bill calls to deliver his long-promised offer: a salaried position with commissions, a company car, and a housing allowance, scouting distressed properties for a consortium of Wall Street investors.

It is everything CeeCee would once have wanted. She turns it down. Gracie has already offered her something else — a part-time role as the shelter's assistant director, learning to run an organization that changes lives. CeeCee, who spent her career making deals and outsmarting people, has discovered that her heart is no longer in it. For the first time, she chooses meaning over money, people over property, and a future she cannot yet fully see over the comfortable one she has already lived.