Twelve minutes in an Appalachian hollow can feel like twelve years when the reckoning is rolling down the mountain.
Margaret didn't sit on the sofa. She paced the kitchen floorboards, her designer leather mules clicking frantically against the ceramic tiles, avoiding the pool of spilled champagne that Trevor had clumsily tried to wipe up with paper towels. Her hands fluttered to her hair, then to her linen collar, her breath catching in ragged, shallow gasps that sounded like dry leaves scraping over asphalt.
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"Harold, this is absurd!" Margaret hissed, her voice vibrating with that high, desperate pitch she used whenever an audit or an unpaid property tax notice arrived in our mailbox. "The FBI? Federal preservation liens? You never told me that old thing was military property! For thirty-six years, you told me your father bought it after the war!"
I sat at the oak dining table—the table my father had helped me build from salvaged red oak in 1974—and looked at my pocket watch.
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