the floorboards.”
I turned toward her.
“Do you regret calling the clerk, Grandma?”
She didn’t answer immediately.
She looked down at her hands—hands worn by decades of gardening, cooking, and raising a family.
“I regret that I raised a son who looked at his mother and saw a line item on a ledger,” she said, her voice steady and unyielding. “I do not regret protecting what your grandfather built.”
The local sheriff’s deputy arrived twenty minutes later.
He was a tall, soft-spoken man named Sheriff Miller, who had known my
