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The eviction notice was taped to the apartment door when Eli Brennan returned from dropping his daughter at school, the bright orange paper impossible to ignore in the gray December morning. Seven days to vacate. He'd known it was coming, had been dodging the landlord's calls for three weeks, but seeing it in writing made the threat real in a way that phone messages hadn't. His daughter Maya was ten years old, and Eli was about to make her homeless two weeks before Christmas.

He pulled the notice down carefully, folding it and putting it in his jacket pocket where Maya wouldn't see it when she got home from school. She'd been through enough this year—her mother leaving in March with a note that said she couldn't handle the pressure anymore, Eli losing his job at the architectural firm in June when the company downsized, the slow descent from comfortable middle-class life to counting pennies for groceries and praying the car didn't break down because repairs were impossible.

The bank statement in his other pocket showed two hundred and seventy-three dollars, everything he had left after paying for Maya's school supplies and winter clothes that mostly fit. Not enough for rent, not enough for deposit on a new place, barely enough to keep them fed until whatever came next. Eli had applied for dozens of jobs, had interviews that went nowhere, had watched his savings evaporate while creditors called with increasing urgency.

He spent the morning on his laptop at the library where internet was free, searching rental listings he couldn't afford and job postings that wanted experience he didn't have. Around noon, a county liquidation notice caught his eye, different from the rental ads, stranger. Old Riverside Pottery Works, complete facility including kilns and equipment, selling for salvage. Minimum bid four hundred dollars.

The photographs showed a sprawling brick complex that looked like it had been slowly dying for decades, industrial buildings arranged around a central courtyard, massive beehive kilns rising like monuments to an era when pottery was made by hand in structures designed to last centuries. The listing noted the property had been county-seized for unpaid taxes, was being sold as-is for salvage only, buyer responsible for demolition and removal.

Eli knew pottery, had studied ceramic arts before switching to architecture, understood that old kiln works contained valuable materials if you knew what to look for. Fire brick from kilns built in the 1800s was worth serious money to people restoring historic structures. The equipment—potter's wheels, clay mixers, vintage glazing tools—could sell to collectors and working potters. Even the building materials, if carefully salvaged, represented income.