Unaware of Her $618M Inheritance, Single Mom Bought Destroyed Lens Factory for $750

Описание: Unaware of Her $618M Inheritance, Single Mom Bought Destroyed Lens Factory for $750

The acceptance letter felt like glass in Sophia Chen's hands. University of Vermont, Full Academic Scholarship, Class of 2028. Her daughter Maya had worked for this. Straight A's through high school, volunteering at the animal shelter every weekend, student council president, debate team captain. Everything a mother could hope for. Everything Sophia had sacrificed for.
And she couldn't afford to send her.
The letter listed what the scholarship didn't cover. Room and board, books, lab fees, health insurance, transportation. The university estimated these costs at $18,000 per year. Sophia had $340 in her checking account. The rent was three weeks overdue. The car had been repossessed last Tuesday. Her credit cards were maxed out paying for Maya's SAT prep course and application fees to twelve different schools.
She sat at the kitchen table of their studio apartment in Rochester, New York, where the radiator clanked but barely produced heat, where water stains spread across the ceiling like bruises, where roaches appeared no matter how much she cleaned. It was January 15th, 2024. Maya's 18th birthday was in six days. The first tuition payment was due in seven months. It might as well have been seven million.
Sophia was 39 years old. She'd been 21 when she got pregnant with Maya, still in college herself, studying engineering at RIT. Maya's father, a classmate named Derek who'd seemed charming and promising, had disappeared the moment she told him. Literally disappeared. Changed his phone number, dropped out of school, vanished like smoke. She'd tried to find him for child support, but his family claimed they didn't know where he was. The legal fees to track him down would have cost more than she'd ever collect.
So she'd done it alone. Dropped out of school with two semesters left to finish her degree. Got a job as a technician at Benton Optical, a small company that manufactured prescription lenses for eyeglasses. The work was precise, demanding, required steady hands and good eyes and patience to get every measurement exactly right. She was good at it. Within three years, she was their best technician. The opticians requested her specifically because she never made mistakes.
But good didn't mean well-paid. She made $16.50 an hour. After taxes, that was about $2,100 a month. Rent was $950 for the studio apartment in a building that should have been condemned. Utilities another $150. Food, transportation, Maya's school supplies, clothes as she grew, medical care when she got sick. The math never worked. Sophia had been living on credit cards and hope for 18 years.
Three months ago, Benton Optical had been bought by a larger corporation. Cost-cutting measures, they called it. Her entire department was laid off on a Friday afternoon with two weeks severance and a handshake from a manager who wouldn't meet her eyes. She'd filed for unemployment immediately. The $320 per week she received didn't cover rent, let alone everything else.
She'd applied to 47 jobs in the past three months. Every optical lab in the region, every manufacturing facility, every position remotely related to her skills. Most didn't respond. The ones that did offered interviews, seemed interested, then went silent. She was either overqualified or underqualified. She had too much experience or not enough. She'd been out of work too long or her references weren't recent enough.
The truth was simpler and darker. She was 39, a single mother, with a gap in her employment. Companies saw risk, not experience. Liability, not skill. She'd started applying to retail positions, fast food, anything. But even those jobs looked at her resume and asked why someone with 18 years of optical experience wanted to work at Target. The answer, because I'm desperate and my daughter needs to eat, wasn't what they wanted to hear.


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