I run Vance Supply. I still consult on the side, restructuring distressed companies — I’m drawn to them, the way you’re drawn to the thing you survived.
I bought a house. A real one, mine alone, no guarantee against it, no husband who can point at the stairs and tell me to pack.
I sold the old house — the one Desmond told me to leave. I owned the lien; in the settlement it came to me. I couldn’t live in it, but I enjoyed signing the paperwork.
My grandmother left me a condo, and I sold it to save a man who didn’t deserve it.
So I used the first profits from Vance Supply to buy a small building downtown, and I put a plaque on it in her name, and the ground floor is a free financial-literacy clinic — mostly for women.
Because the thing that saved me wasn’t luck.
It was knowing the difference between paying off a debt and buying it.
Between a gift and a position.
Between what a marriage tells you you’re worth and what the numbers actually say.
Most women who get thrown out of a house on the day they finish sacrificing for it don’t have a note in their back pocket.
Now some of them will at least know the questions to ask.
Last month, a young woman came into the clinic. Newly married. Her husband’s business was struggling and she was thinking of “helping with the debt.”
She asked me if that was smart.
I thought about a bottle of prosecco, and a living room, and a laugh that came out of me from somewhere very deep.
“Helping is fine,” I told her. “Just make sure you understand exactly what you’re buying.
And always, always know who holds the note.”
She wrote it down.
I gave her my card.
Simone Vance.
The name I laughed my way back into, on the worst and best day of my life, when a man who thought he’d thrown me out discovered he’d been living in my house, running my company, and owing me everything —
