One's Trash Is Treasure (Virgilio Chronicles)

Virgilio Vugteveen has hit rock bottom: sleeping in an abandoned shipping container with nothing but a bag of newspapers for a pillow. Then a woman named Carla finds him there, hands him a fake wedding ring, and makes him an offer: pretend to be her husband, and they’ll both be safer on the streets.

What starts as a survival tactic turns into something neither of them expected. Together, they turn scavenged junk into a scrappy resale business, an abandoned shipping container into a home, and two strangers into the kind of friendship Virgilio has spent his whole life running from. But home, business, and found family can all be bulldozed—literally—and Virgilio has never been good at staying anywhere long enough to find out what he’d be willing to fight for.

He came to Portland to disappear. He didn’t expect to matter to someone. Now the only question is whether he can leave Carla better than he found her—without losing himself in the process.