The paper utility card attached to the shower pipe showed the last meter check was August twelfth at nine in the morning.
“The water bill for last month was sixty-two dollars,” I said. “If this tap has been running at forty pounds of pressure since yesterday, the next bill will spike past three hundred.”
Brian had surrendered his key twenty-six hours ago, swearing under oath that he had locked the property. The water heater had been running continuously through two full cycles.
I walked downstairs. My father was kneeling near the dining nook beside my grandmother Lena’s oval walnut mirror, smashed face down on the wet hardwood.
The thick glass plate was cracked into dozens of sharp fragments. The hand-carved walnut frame had been snapped into four distinct pieces.
Among the glass fragments lay a tiny carved wooden rose, three inches long, which had formed the central peak of the frame.
“He insisted on item seven during the August fourth mediation session,” I said.
Brian had spent three hours arguing over this mirror, rejecting Claire Delgado’s two hundred dollar cash buyout. He claimed it matched the dining trim. Then, forty-eight hours before court turnover, he listed it on the abandoned personal property schedule and left it on the floor.
My father put three loose fragments of glass inside his handkerchief. “He knew what this mirror meant to you, Nicky.”
“The appraiser valued it at four hundred dollars on June fourteenth,” I whispered.
