I paid the thirty-five dollars in cash out of the crumpled bills in my pocket.

The little room smelled of pine cleaner and dry wallboard.

I sat on the edge of the sagging mattress, took off my wool jacket, and laid it flat across the foot of the bed.

Tiffany figured she had me cornered with no money, no building and no way to hire a lawyer before the merger signing on Friday the eighteenth.

She believed I was sitting on this sagging bed, stripped of everything I’d built in thirty-five years of running my company.