Her Broke Handyman Husband Was the Secret Billionaire novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Do-Over
At noon on the second Saturday of January, the plant floor smelled of sawdust and cinnamon.
The crew had hung paper snowflakes from the rafters, under my grandfather's first sawblade.
Two hundred and twelve people stood in clean shirts between the idle presses, and the foreman's wife had a toddler on her shoulders with a rosette pinned to his hat.
Alma sat in the front row in her camel coat, with her anchor brooch polished.
Roberta stood at my side in a green dress, holding a bouquet of drill bits wrapped in ribbon.
"They're cute," she said. "They're also heavy."
The county clerk who had married us the first time stood at the pallet with her stapler.
"For old time's sake," she said.
Elias waited beside her in a gray suit that fit him, and he was not looking at the clerk.
Then the doors at the top of the ramp opened, and I heard a sound I did not expect.
A chair, scraping.
My mother came down the concrete ramp alone.
She was carrying a dining chair.
It was mahogany, with a velvet seat, and it had been carried out of her dining room six weeks earlier by a man in black.
She had tied a white ribbon around the back rail.
She walked the aisle I had walked with a divorce petition, and she set the chair down at the foot of the pallet, and she smoothed the velvet.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Her Broke Handyman Husband Was the Secret Billionaire are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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