“No… that’s impossible! Coraly is an Ashworth! Her father was an itinerant carpenter from Tennessee! My mother’s genealogists checked her records four times before I married her!”
“Your mother’s genealogists were fed thirty-four years of manufactured naval counter-intelligence, Thad,” I spoke softly.
I walked to the desk.
I reached into my Scottish tweed hacking jacket.
I pulled out a small, circular, hand-machined piece of tarnished naval ordnance brass:
The master **1944 United States Navy Admiralty Foundation Die**—the physical die used by my grandfather, Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior, to stamp the red wax on the original wartime sovereign deeds eighty years ago:
*CLINK.*
I laid the heavy brass die flat atop his shattered bourbon glass:
“My legal name is **Coraly Eleanor Mercer-Ashworth**.”
“Sole surviving biological granddaughter of Arthur Mercer Senior.”
“The man who surveyed every cubic foot of bedrock beneath this mortuary eighty years ago.”
I bared my teeth in a cold, razor-thin line of polar diamond:
