A steady sickening pulse bearing itself deep in the bone.

The Bedford County Courthouse was a two-story red-brick relic built in the late nineteenth century, sitting square in the center of the town green beneath a canopy of bare, frozen oaks. Its tall white columns were peeling slightly at the capitals, and the limestone steps leading up to the double oak doors were stained with centuries of red Virginia mud and salt dust.

At 0945, the parking lot across the street was already filling with pickup trucks and local utility vans.

Parked directly in front of the main entrance, occupying two spaces marked for municipal personnel, sat Maxwell's truck: a 2024 Ford F-250 Super Duty, metallic black, lifted six inches on thirty-seven-inch mud tires, with dual chrome exhaust stacks rising behind the cab and an oversized commercial brush guard that had never pushed a single branch in its life. The truck was spotless, polished to a mirror sheen that had cost two hundred dollars at a detail shop in Roanoke.

Standing beside the truck bed, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and laughing with a middle-aged man in a Carhartt jacket, was Maxwell.

At thirty-one, my older brother had the soft, fleshy jawline of a boy who had spent his entire adulthood hiding behind his father's shouting. He wore a brand-new wool rancher's jacket with an imitation shearling collar, tight designer denim, and ostrich-skin cowboy boots with silver toe caps. He was holding a leather-bound legal planner under his arm, waving it around like an auctioneer’s paddle as he talked to Dale Higgins, the surveyor.

"I’m telling you, Dale," Maxwell was saying, his voice carrying easily through the crisp, freezing mountain air, "the timber cruise is already done. We get the judge to sign the clearance order today, we have the feller-bunchers on the lower forty acres by next Thursday. There’s three hundred thousand dollars of standing black walnut on that ridge. The old man’s cabin is coming down first. It’s an eyesore anyway. You can’t put a four-wheeler through that valley with that pile of logs blocking the access trail."

Higgins spat a stream of dark tobacco juice into the slush beside the curb. "Your sister ain't gonna show, Max? You sure about that? A registered letter went to that Richmond address. If she got wind of this, she could make it messy."

Maxwell let out that familiar, dry, arrogant bray of laughter that had echoed down our hallway whenever he stole my allowance or blamed me for his broken tools.

"Hale? Man, Hale is probably sitting in some bar outside an Army post in Texas feeling sorry for herself. She hasn't set foot in this county in three years. She doesn't have the stomach for a legal fight. When Dad called her three days ago, she sounded like a whipped dog. She’s broke, Dale. The military doesn't pay shit. She’ll get the notification in six months, realize it’s done, and go cry in her barracks."

"She’s Navy, boy," an older, gravelly voice snapped from behind them.

Calvin Donovan stepped out from the covered porch of the county records office across the alley.

At sixty-four, my father looked like an old iron wedge that had been beaten against stone until the edges were burred and jagged. He wore his Sunday suit—a shiny, synthetic dark brown three-piece that pulled tight across his heavy gut, a yellowing polyester tie secured with an imitation gold horseshoe clip, and black work shoes that had been hastily wiped with a damp rag. His face was weathered, red-veined around the nose from thirty years of drinking draft beer and shouting over air tools in his transmission shop.

Beside him walked Cora.

My mother wore an oversized black wool coat with a fake fur collar that smelled of mothballs and hairspray, her hands clutching a faux-leather handbag against her stomach like a shield. Her eyes were small, pale, and darting nervously across the town green, constantly checking the faces of the locals who nodded politely to Calvin as they passed.

"Don't matter what branch she is," Calvin sneered, stepping off the curb and tossing his cigarette butt into the gutter. "She’s an ungrateful, unnatural girl who walked out on this family the second she thought she was too big for her boots. Arthur was eighty-two and out of his mind when he signed that deed over to her. He had dementia, plain and simple. A man doesn't give sixty acres of prime mountain land to an eighteen-year-old girl with thick arms while his own son is working sixty hours a week in a transmission shop."

"Calvin," Cora muttered, her voice thin, reedy, vibrating with that perpetual, whining anxiety she wore like a housecoat. "What if the judge asks about the roof? You know she sent that wire for the roof in twenty-twenty-one. We got the paperwork from the bank."

"You shut your mouth about the roof, Cora!" Calvin hissed, turning on her with a sudden, sharp glare that made my mother instinctively hunch her shoulders and drop her gaze to the slush. "The roof was an emergency stabilization of a family asset. She didn't pay for that roof out of love; she paid for it because she was trying to buy her way back into my will. The surveyor’s report says the cabin is uninhabitable. That’s what the judge is going to read. That’s what the record is going to say."

He pulled a heavy, gold-plated pocket watch from his vest—a watch that had belonged to Grandpa Arthur before Calvin had quietly removed it from the bedside table at the hospice center—and snapped the case open.

"Ten-fifteen," Calvin grunted, looking toward the courthouse steps. "Vance is waiting inside. We get in, we let the judge sign the default decree, we file the partition certificate with the county clerk, and by noon we own the mountain."

"What about Hale's stuff in the back bedroom?" Maxwell asked, lighting another cigarette, grinning through the gray smoke. "All those old high school sports plaques and her old footlocker?"