Crumb

Their father left them the house. The house came with a second mortgage he'd never mentioned, a balloon payment due in six months, and forty thousand dollars of deferred maintenance standing between them and a sale. Holda Properties finds them before they've finished grieving. No website. No reviews. Just a business card on the doorframe with linen texture and a phone number. She'll buy the property as-is. Assume both mortgages. Clear their father's debts. And lease it back to them — monthly payments counting toward a buyback at the end of five years. The escalation clause is on page seven. The maintenance obligations are in section 5.1. The 18% interest on the "improvement loan" is disclosed, technically, in dense text. Every clause is legal. Everything is disclosed. The house gets sweeter with every coat of paint they apply. By the time Gretel maps Holda's portfolio — eighteen properties, same contracts, same contractor, same pattern — she and Hansel have paid fifty thousand dollars into a house they will never own. The oven, she realises, was always the plan. Crumb is Hansel & Gretel retold as a predatory lending scheme. The witch doesn't need a forest. She has a lease.