The funeral was nine days ago. The flowers people sent are still dying in vases around this house. And I am sitting at my kitchen table, staring at financial statements that explain my husband’s life more honestly than he ever did.
Not crying. Not holding his photograph. Sitting here with a calculator, a legal pad, and four years of records from a company Whitmore inherited and quietly drove toward collapse while I slept beside him, believing we were still living inside the same marriage.
The debt is real. I found it three days after we buried him. Not because anyone warned me, but because I am the kind of woman who opens drawers other people leave closed.
Always have been. That instinct built Pruitt Facilities Solutions from one janitorial contract in 2001 into a commercial facilities company managing properties across three counties. Not through connections.
Not through inheritance. Through work people considered beneath them and I considered reliable. My name is Ellen Pruitt.
I am fifty-three years old. I have negotiated contracts, signed payroll, managed crews, survived recessions, and handled every hard thing this life placed in front of me without collapsing publicly. I intended to handle this too.
The numbers spread across my kitchen table were devastating. Whitmore’s inherited company was carrying active creditor claims, vendor disputes stretching back nearly two years, equipment financing defaults, tax exposure, and two properties with liens attached. He apparently tried managing through extensions and partial payments.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
