This "backstory" is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2024. It had rained all night in Marshfield, where I live, and I knew what that meant. At 5:30 a.m., a friend texted me a photo of Plainfield's Heartbreak Hotel apartment building. Floodwaters had torn it in half. Route 2 was closed, so it took me 25 minutes to get there instead of 10. Plainfield was foggy and quiet. A small crowd stood at the crumbling edge of the chasm where the Mill Street bridge used to be. Nearby, across the still-raging Great Brook, the Heartbreak's quaintly formal Italianate façade looked untouched, but a side wall had been torn off by debris, exposing a stranger's kitchen décor to the world. The rambling rear section had been swept away altogether. [content-1] My friend Lauren Geiger was standing outside her Hudson Avenue home, looking stunned. Her car was socked in by two feet of sandy mud, and her basement was flooded to the ceiling. "I don't know what to do," she said repeatedly. The two of us saw Nancy Everhart of Marshfield approaching to help, pushing a wheelbarrow full of shovels. In a classic case of small-town Vermont, she's married to Geiger's ex-husband. I was stunned myself. It had been exactly a year since a flood had devastated my town of Marshfield, and I'd been dreading the anniversary. Now it was happening again, only worse, one town away. I suppressed the feeling of guilt that I had a home to return to. I felt relief that no one was harmed in the fall of the Heartbreak — but also disbelief and, well, heartbreak that a local institution was no more. The ramshackle grandeur of the old apartment house embodied the freewheeling spirit of odd, irrepressible Plainfield. My kids' dad, Eric Allen, lived in the Heartbreak as a newly arrived idealist in the 1990s. Later, the Heartbreak — so named because it was often a refuge from broken relationships — was home to a dear friend displaced by divorce. Eli Barlow, who had lived in the Heartbreak, pulled a pair of lawn chairs out of his car and politely invited me to take a seat while I interviewed him about the events of the night before. "It sounded less dramatic than a tree…