Chapter 2 #2
He exhaled hard and continued, “I’ve got a shoebox of receipts, a drawer so full of bills and returned checks and who knows what else that I can’t close it, and a stack of letters from insurance companies I quit opening because every last one might as well be written in Sanskrit.”
He looked at the desk, then back at her.
“Turns out I had it half right. The trouble isn’t that I haven’t hired anybody.
The trouble is I didn’t have the sense to know I needed to until somebody with more sense than me went and arranged it.
” A pause. “Rose knew before I did what I needed. She has a way of doing that.”
Sunny looked at the desk again. That mess was definitely not staged for her benefit, to hide the fact that this “job” was just charity wearing a new disguise.
That mountain of paper was the real article: a genuine, organic disaster, accreted over months by a man too busy keeping people alive to figure out how to cope with it.
Numbers didn’t lie. People lied, and sometimes they used numbers to do it.
She had bet her whole first life on a man who lied and manipulated numbers to hide his thefts.
She’d wanted to understand what he’d done and why he’d done it, which was why she got her forensic accounting degree.
But numbers, once you knew how to find the real ones, told a true story. And the numbers on his desk were screaming for help.
She crossed to the desk before she’d decided to, drawn to a mess of financial documents the way other folks were drawn to a warm campfire.
She riffled a few of the receipts overflowing the shoebox.
It had to be holding hundreds of receipts in no order at all.
The open drawer of insurance letters was worse.
For one disorienting moment the wrong half of her brain came online, the half she’d built from scratch in three years of night classes, the half that had spent every waking hour since Winston died hunting one specific bank account that one specific man had hidden in one specific place she’d never found.
At least, not yet. She would never stop looking for that money.
It was blood money. She’d earned it. The only reason she wanted one penny of it was for her children.
She owed them at least one thing from their father that was not all bad.
That suspicious, investigative half of her brain scanned the chaos for a pattern, anything that didn’t belong on this desk within this mess.
Nothing jumped out at her as a red flag.
She told herself sternly that he was a good doctor and a lousy bookkeeper. That’s all.
There was nothing here to find. No second set of books. No hidden storage. Just an honest man’s honest wreck. The relief of that was so unfamiliar it felt like a draft from an open window.
“You’re not just behind on billing,” she heard herself say.
“Based on some of the postmarks I see, I’m betting you’ve got claims that have passed their filing window.
That means you’re not going to collect money you’ve already earned.
The insurance companies get to keep it now, free, because nobody filed by the deadline. ”
He looked startled, as if he didn’t know such a thing was possible.
She continued, “You’ve got at least one payer who’s flagged you. See the red? That means they think you’re a problem account, and they’ll slow-walk everything you send from here on out until somebody calls and gets you un-flagged.”
She nudged a coffee can stuffed with what looked like uncashed checks. “If any of these have been sitting more than six months, your bank may not honor them, and you’ll have to go back to the patients and ask them to write you new ones, which nobody enjoys.”
She straightened. “This isn’t a filing problem. It’s a bleeding problem. You’re losing money out of dozens of small cuts and you can’t see it because it never shows up as one big number. In fact, it shows up as nothing. As money that simply never arrived that you probably never thought to miss.”
She fell silent. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite name.
“That,” he said after a moment, “is more words about my finances than I’ve said to myself in a year. You sound like more than just a bookkeeper.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m a forensic accountant.”
His eyebrows shot up with rather more alacrity than any other part of him had moved this morning. “I may be terrible at this stuff, but I’m not a criminal!”
“No one’s suggesting you are. But you may need someone with my skill set to properly dig through all this stuff, sort it out, and claw back as much of the money you’ve already forfeited as possible.
For the record, my Financial Forensics certification takes a great deal more schooling than your shoebox requires. ”
She mentally winced. She always had struggled with a tendency toward bluntness. Her mother had despaired of ever training it out of her, but she’d eventually gotten the hang of hiding it.
But the past few years of being unable to say anything true at all had pushed her to the limit. And then she’d found this place where nobody knew the right questions to ask to force her to lie and her natural honesty had come roaring back.
And possibly overcorrecting just a wee bit, she thought wryly.
“There are cheaper people who could organize most of this for you,” she said, continuing her streak of excessive honesty because she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “You ought to know that before you decide anything.”
He was quiet a moment, but not awkward about it. He was just thinking and unbothered about doing so.
“Seems to me,” he said at last, “a man bleeding from a dozen cuts he can’t see ought to hire the one person who can see them.
” He nodded at the desk. “I don’t need that organized.
I need it stopped. Then I need somebody to keep it stopped so I can go back to the only part of being a physician I’m any good at.
” He looked at her, levelly. “If you’re willing to be badly overqualified for a country doctor’s billing manager position, I’d be a fool to send you away and get somebody less qualified, even if they are cheaper. The job’s yours if you want it.”
She waited for the other shoe to drop. The comment that made it clear this job offer was charity wearing a real job’s good clothes.
The moment when he would say, and don’t you worry about those children, now, and reduce her into a thing he was rescuing.
She braced herself to refuse the job she so desperately needed but knew better than to accept.
Charity offered to her out of performative pity always came with strings attached. Always. If the past three years had taught her nothing else, they’d taught her that.
She knew how to refuse that. She had three years’ practice refusing it.
But he didn’t say another word. There was no flash of condescending sympathy in his clear brown eyes. No loaded language or double entendre woven into the job offer.
Instead, he made it sound as if she would be doing him the favor. The strange part, the part that loosened a knot in her gut that she hadn’t known was pulled so tight, was that the desk swore he wasn’t lying.
He truly was drowning. Whoever ran a medical practice out of that desk was in way, way over his head. And she truly did have the training and skills to pull him out of the water sucking him down.
No matter how she looked at it, the numbers didn’t lie. He needed precisely the thing she happened to be good at, and neither of them had any reason to pretend otherwise.
“What does the job pay?” she asked, because a woman with eleven dollars had to ask, and because asking it plainly was its own small refusal to be a charity case.
He named a number. It was fair, better than fair for a regular office manager. Honestly, it was in line with what she would make chasing down financial fraud.
She watched his face the whole time he named a salary, and she saw no sign of him padding it for pity.
“I can only work part-time for now,” she said. “I have four children and no one yet to look after them. I’ll need to work around them until I sort that out. Some of it I can do from home in the evenings once I see your system.”
His gaze was blank.
She paused. “You don’t have a system, do you? Never mind. I’ll build you one.”
“Working around your kids is fine. Whatever works for you.” Then, dry as a creek bed in August: “After all, I built my whole filing strategy around a shoebox. I can be flexible.”
It surprised a laugh out of her, and she was so out of practice that it startled her worse than him.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take it.” And then, because the quiet afterward wanted something put in it, and because she was constitutionally unable to leave a true thing unsaid: “Thank you.”
“Thank Rose,” he said wryly. “I just signed where she told me to.”
She turned to go. She’d promised Presley no more than an hour.
But on her way out of the office, her eye snagged on a single, small detail in the room that was wrong.
A girl’s gray cardigan lay neatly, perfectly folded on the wide sill of the big bay window.
A paperback sat on top of it with the bookmark standing perfectly upright.
Not one thing about the sweater and book was out of place in that single square foot of an otherwise completely chaotic room.
Somebody young lives here, Sunny thought.
Somebody who kept one small corner of the world in faultless order because she couldn’t keep the rest of it in any order at all. Sunny knew the type down to the ground. She was raising one, too.
She let herself out past the door that wanted oil into a morning that had, against every one of her better instincts, gotten a little easier than it had been an hour ago.
She had a job.
She still didn’t trust it. But she had it.