“Colonel Mercer…?!
But… you were cleaning houses!
You cleaned this house for eight years!
I saw you walking down the road with a plastic bucket!”
“I audited this homestead for eight years, Julian,” Colonel Clara Mercer answered softly.
My voice had no microphone.
Yet it filled that empty four-thousand-square-foot house with forty decibels of compressed, unyielding polar diamond:
“You told me nine years ago that I was a penniless liability who would never own a home.”
“You threw five hundred dollars onto my floor two minutes ago and told me to get off your property.”
I stepped down the final three steps of the staircase.
My hand-welted leather field boots crushed the five hundred-dollar bills into the hardwood with a clean, concussive *CRUNCH*:
*CRUNCH.*
I stopped two inches from where my ex-husband stood trembling in his Huntsman suit.
