Her Broke Handyman Husband Was the Secret Billionaire novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The Hardware Store
On Saturday morning, the brass bell over the hardware store door rang twice.
I was sitting at the kitchen table upstairs with my coffee and a quarterly report, listening through the floor.
Elias had been down there since seven in his father's green canvas apron.
"It's got pockets," he'd said, when I raised an eyebrow, and I had stopped raising it.
The bell rang, and nobody spoke.
Then I heard heels on the old linoleum, hesitant and expensive, stopping between the paint cans and the fuses.
"Mrs. Haverkamp," Elias said.
"I'd like to buy a screw."
"What kind?"
"I don't know."
"What's it for?"
"A gutter," said my mother, in a voice I had never heard her use in her life.
There was a pause, and the rattle of a drawer, and a soft, careful scrape of small hardware.
"Number eight, two inches," Elias said. "Eleven cents."
"I have a twenty."
"I'll make change."
"Keep it."
"I won't," he said mildly. "Nineteen eighty-nine."
I put my hand over my mouth.
Then the stairs began to creak.
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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