The beach house sat on a rise above the Atlantic, four bedrooms and a wraparound deck and the particular light that the Outer Banks produces in late afternoon, a gold that goes amber as it approaches the water, and I had bought it with my own money after seven years of working hours that most people would not consider sustainable.
I want to say that first, before the courtroom and the documents and my mother’s careful tears, before the lawsuit and the discovery process and the mediator who had aged visibly between filing and trial. I want to say it first because the story has a tendency, when it is told in other ways, to become a story about what other people did to me, and I am not interested in telling a story about what other people did to me.
I am interested in telling a story about what I built.
My name is Maya Sterling.
I am thirty-two years old and I am a senior architect at Anderson and Associates in Raleigh, which is one of the firms in the state that takes its work seriously enough to be difficult to work for, and I have been there for seven years and I have been building something for all of those years, the career and the savings and the specific kind of life that comes from deciding early what you want and then making every available decision in service of that wanting.
I grew up in Charlotte in a house that was comfortable by external measure.
My parents were not wealthy but they were not struggling, my father worked in financial consulting and my mother worked part-time at a nonprofit, and the house we grew up in had four bedrooms and a yard and the general appearance of a family that was managing its life well.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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