Chapter 1 - The First Inspection
Derek slid down the drywall like wet cardboard, his heels kicking against the baseboard he’d just forced Sarah to inspect. He stopped two feet short of the floor, his sneakers tangled in his own oversized sweatpants, staring at me with a look that had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with pure, unadulterated shock. His mouth opened twice before a sound came out—a thin, reedy squeak that sounded entirely wrong coming from a six-foot-two twenty-something who spent nine hours a day screaming into a headset.
“You—you’re old,” he stammered, his fingers clawing uselessly at the wallpaper seam where I’d pinned his shoulder. “My dad’s sixty-four. You’re like... what are you doing?”
“My age is none of your concern, son,” I said, keeping my weight balanced on the balls of my feet, my grip steady on the collar of his faded designer hoodie. “What concerns me is that you’ve got eight months of joint compression sitting in that hallway, and you’re treating her like an infantry private on kitchen patrol after two days of no sleep. Get up.”
“I’m calling the police,” Derek choked out, his face turning the color of a bruised plum as he tried to twist away. “You assaulted me in my own house. This is breaking and entering. Or trespassing. My dad has an attorney in Fairfax who handles—"
“Go ahead,” I interrupted, dropping my voice down into that register that used to make nineteen-year-old recruits from the Chicago projects stare straight at the third button of my campaign cover. Not loud. Just heavy. The kind of tone that implies the alternative is much worse than whatever you’re currently complaining about. “Call them. Tell them your father-in-law walked in and found you making a heavily pregnant woman scrub baseboards on her knees because you lost a kill-streak in a digital war game. Let’s see how the county prosecutor classifies that under domestic endangerment codes in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
Derek’s jaw clicked shut. The Fairfax attorney vanished from his strategy.
Behind me, Sarah made a small, hitching sound. “Dad. Please. Don’t. He’s... it’s just been a bad week at the logistics firm. He didn’t mean—"
“Sarah, honey,” I said without turning around, never taking my eyes off the boyish, petulant features of the man who had her living in a house that smelled like stale Red Bull and sour cheese. “Go sit on the couch. Not the floor. The couch. Put your feet up on that leather ottoman. If you need a pillow, use the one with the stupid floral pattern your mother-in-law bought you that you hate. Go.”
She hesitated, her hand resting against her lower back, her fingers white where she clutched the hem of her cardigan. For a second, I saw the sixteen-year-old girl who used to cry when her goldfish died, balanced awkwardly against the thirty-year-old woman who had spent the last two years learning how to make herself small so she wouldn't trigger a shouting match.
Then she moved. Slowly, carefully, wincing as her hips took the weight, she crossed the room and sat down.
I released Derek’s collar, but I didn’t step back. I let him slide the rest of the way down until he was squatting on the carpet, smoothing down his hoodie with shaking hands.
“You think you’re tough because you can drop an old man?” Derek muttered, his eyes darting toward the kitchen as if looking for an exit or a weapon. “You’re retired. What are you going to do? Stay here? You live three states away. You’ve got a garden in Delaware and a mortgage that’s almost paid off. You’re going to go home by Sunday, and then things go back to normal.”
“Normal,” I repeated. I reached down, picked up the scrub brush he’d left on the laminate, and turned it over in my calloused palm. The bristles were stiff with dried detergent. “You use this?”
“That’s—that’s for the scuffs,” he mumbled.
“It’s a deck brush,” I said, looking down at him. “You gave an eight-month-pregnant woman a deck brush with industrial-strength pine oil to clean seven inches of vinyl trim. Do you have any idea what pine oil does to the skin when you’re breathing it in an unventilated hallway with thirty percent humidity?”
“She wanted to do it,” he lied, though the lie lacked any real muscle now. “She’s always cleaning. She’s nesting. Her mother said she’s like that.”
“Her mother is dead, Derek, and you know it,” I said softly. “Don’t bring Janet into this unless you want to talk about the kind of man she raised you to think was acceptable. Which we’re going to do. But not right now.”
I tossed the brush onto the coffee table, right on top of his high-end controller. The plastic clattered against the buttons.
“Here is how the next four weeks are going to work,” I said, leaning one hand against the back of the sectional, looking down at him like he was a recruit who’d just tried to hide a half-eaten box of donuts in his wall locker. “You are going to finish that crib tonight. Not tomorrow. Not when your tournament ends. Tonight. Every single bolt, every washer, every instruction booklet that you threw in the garbage because you thought it was too complicated for your engineering degree.”
“I have a meeting at nine tomorrow morning—"
“You have a deployment,” I corrected. “To the hardware store. You’re going to buy a gallon of white semi-gloss paint to fix the scuff you made her crawl for, and you’re going to do it yourself with a small artist’s brush so you don't get any on the baseboard. And while you’re doing that, Sarah and I are going to pack two bags.”
Derek’s head snapped up. “Pack bags? Where are they going? You can’t just take my wife—"
“She isn’t your property, son. She’s a guest in a house where she’s currently being treated like an administrative error,” I said. “She’s coming home with me to Delaware until the baby arrives. And before you start thinking about calling your father in Fairfax to wire you bail money for a custody dispute, let me remind you of something: I have three decades of records regarding military housing standards, and you have three months of bank statements showing sixty-four separate transactions to online gaming sites while your wife’s health insurance deductible went unpaid.”
Derek’s face went from purple to gray in about two seconds. “How—how do you know about that?”
May you like
“A Master Sergeant doesn't need a forensic accountant to spot a man who’s spending his family’s grocery money on digital skins,” I said, walking over to the coat rack by the front door and picking up my jacket. “Get the Allen wrench out of the garage, Derek. We’ve got forty-eight hours of neglected duty to catch up on.”
---
