“Mommy?” she called out softly. “Is it Grandma?”
I looked at the phone. Then, I pressed the power button, held it down, and swiped to turn the device completely off.
The screen went black.
“No, baby,” I said, walking over to the fort and crawling inside with her under the warm glow of the fairy lights we had strung from the bookshelf. “It’s nobody.”
I pulled the blankets up to our chins and let her rest her head on my chest. But as I listened to her slow, rhythmic breathing eventually ease into sleep, I stared into the dark room, my mind racing.
Travis wasn’t bluffing. Two thousand dollars was two months of my mortgage payment. It was Sadie’s winter clothes, her dental checkup, her school supplies, and our emergency grocery fund combined. I was a glazier; I worked on commission and hourly wages, scraping by on grit and seventy-hour workweeks.
If Travis took me to court, if Vanessa pressed charges, I didn’t have the money to fight them.
And deep down, I knew Vanessa wasn’t going to stop at a replacement bag. She smelled blood. She had the entire family mobilized against me, convinced I was an unstable, violent lunatic.
I looked at my daughter’s peaceful face in the soft light.
*Let them come,* I thought, my jaw tightening into iron. *Let them bring everything they have.*
At six o’clock on Monday morning, the temperature on the rooftop of the new downtown medical plaza was twelve degrees below freezing.
The wind blew down from the limestone ridges of the Black Hills like an open razor, slicing through my insulated Carhartt jacket and biting into my cheeks. My gloved hands gripped the twin vacuum suction cups secured to a ten-foot by six-foot sheet of double-paned architectural glass.
“Easy, Rebecca! Swing her port side two inches!” shouted Mack, my foreman, his voice muffled by his heavy wool balaclava. “Watch that corner! If you kiss that steel beam, this whole panel is toast!”
“I got it,” I grunted through my teeth.
Every muscle in my back, shoulders, and core screamed as I counter-balanced the weight of the massive glass sheet. Suspended fifty feet above the concrete parking lot by a crane hoist, the panel caught the brutal morning wind like a sail. One wrong shift of weight, one momentary lapse in concentration, and three thousand dollars of structural glass would explode into ten thousand razor-sharp fragments.
I planted my steel-toed boots against the scaffolding, adjusted my leverage, and eased the panel into the aluminum retaining track with a dull, satisfying *thunk*.
“Clear!” Mack bellowed, locking the mechanical clamps. “Good set, Mercer! Goddamn, you’ve got ice in your veins today.”
I detached my suction lifters and stepped back onto the safety platform, my breath coming in ragged white plumes. My hands were shaking, not from the cold, but from the bone-deep exhaustion of having slept less than four hours a night since Saturday.
“Take ten,” Mack said, wiping frost from his eyebrows as he offered me a battered thermos of black coffee. “You look like you went twelve rounds with a snowplow, Bec. Everything okay at home? How was Sadie’s birthday?”
I took the steaming plastic cup, letting the heat seep through my thick leather gloves. The urge to spill the whole humiliating, toxic mess onto Mack was overwhelming. Mack was sixty, a blunt, no-nonsense veteran who had hired me when every other commercial glass outfit in the state laughed at a five-foot-five woman applying for heavy installation. He was more of a father to me than Richard Mercer had ever been.
“Party went off the rails,” I muttered, staring out over the frozen gray rooftops of Rapid City. “Family drama.”
Mack snorted, leaning against the scaffolding railing. “Family. Can’t shoot ’em, can’t trade ’em in. What happened?”
“Vanessa happened,” I said, taking a bitter sip of the coffee. “She deliberately smashed Sadie’s cake. So I threw her two-thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton bag into the fire pit.”
Mack froze. The thermos paused halfway to his mouth. He blinked at me through his safety goggles, his craggy face completely blank for three long seconds.
Then, he threw his head back and let out a laugh so loud it echoed off the steel girders of the unfinished building.
“Holy shit, Mercer!” he wheezed, slapping his thigh. “You tossed the princess’s purse in the fire? Man, I would have paid a week’s pay to see the look on her plastic face!”
“Travis is threatening to sue me,” I said, the gravity of the situation pulling the fleeting amusement right out of the air. “He sent me a formal letter of intent this morning. Written by some strip-mall lawyer he plays golf with. They’re giving me ten business days to pay twenty-one hundred dollars, or they’re filing a civil suit for property damage and ‘intentional infliction of emotional distress.’ And Vanessa filed a report with the sheriff’s department.”
