When Anna walked out of our apartment two years ago, she didn’t slam the door. She didn’t scream. She didn’t even cry. She simply said, “I can’t do this anymore,” picked up her suitcase, and left—leaving me standing there with our four-year-old twins, Max and Lily, still clutching their dinosaur pajamas.

It wasn’t just my heart that broke that day—it was the entire framework of the life I’d built. One day we were a family, and the next I was a single father in one of the most expensive cities in the country, with no job, no plan, and two little humans depending on me for every answer I didn’t have.

I had been a software engineer at a promising startup—until it wasn’t. The company folded under shady management, and I went from six figures to zero overnight.