She’d been pleasantly surprised when her husband, Frank, encouraged her to go for it. Take the risk. Give it a year and see what happens. Even though they were still paying off loans they’d taken out when Frank and his best friend, Ryan Melanson III, started their private-practice law firm. Compared to the emotional roller coaster that she and Frank had been on trying to conceive a child, the ups and downs of launching a new business seemed like a walk in the park.

The only thing that made Frank uneasy was her going alone into strangers’ homes. You just never knew. So he’d set up location sharing on her phone so he’d know where to start looking if she didn’t come home, and bought her a stun gun, baby blue, about the size of a TV remote. She’d fired it once. The sparks and lightning crackle had scared her half to death. She’d dropped the gadget into her gear bag and hoped she would never have to use it.

Emily had partnered with her best friend, Becca Jain, a onetime nurse turned social worker turned life coach, who was perfectly equipped to hold clients’ hands and nurture them through the peeling away of personal property, as painful for some as peeling off layers of skin. Turned out people could part with that beloved herd of plastic horses that they’d collected when they were eight or that flowing chiffon they’d worn to their senior prom if they had its image saved in a digital archive. Emily made the freeze-frame videos capturing vanishing possessions. She and Becca called themselves Freeze-Frame Clutter Kickers, their logo a high-heeled boot kicking an unspooling reel of videotape.

Emily’s sock-sorting had gotten them off to a good start. Now she was creating a closet-sorting video to grab the attention of more potential customers.

“Emmy, I’m off!” Frank shouted up to her. She’d left him downstairs in the kitchen, poring over yard-sale ads that he’d printed off Craigslist and Facebook. Every Saturday, with military-like precision, he plotted a route, then left the house no later than seven-thirty, because, according to Frank, no one meant it when they advertised no early birds.

Emily left the bedroom and crossed the upstairs hall that was narrowed by floor-to-ceiling bookcases loaded with Frank’s books. Continued past the door to what was supposed to be the guest room but which was rapidly turning into Frank’s storage closet.

When she got to the landing, Frank was at the foot of the stairs, grinning up at her. He went to weekend yard sales looking distinctly un-lawyerly in a pair of grungy Levi’s and a T-shirt that Emily had had made for him. It featured a New Yorker cartoon of an elderly man, lying in a hospital bed and saying to the woman holding his hand, “I should have bought more crap.”