“If you can document that they locked the legal owner out of her own property, it only strengthens our position.”

That afternoon, I returned to my parents’ building, and found my remaining cardboard boxes, my clothes, Sophia’s toys, my books, stacked haphazardly in the public hallway near the elevators, dumped there like garbage waiting for collection.

I took out my phone, and I recorded a slow, steady video of the whole scene, the boxes, the hallway, the number on the apartment door.

Then I knocked.