“Most folks, even my patients, call me Hank,” he said.
His eyes moved over her, not the inappropriate way some men looked, just a quick inventory to check a potential patient for signs of illness or injury.He hung the towel on its hook and waited calmly, like a man with all the time in the world and no particular need to fill any of it.
It unsettled her more than questions would have.
She took a deep breath.Confidence, Sunny.Project being in controlof the situation.
“Rose sent me,” she said, getting straight to the point because that was the only way she knew to do anything that frightened her.“About a bookkeeping position.Handling your billing and insurance—“ she gestured at the desk before she could stop her hand.“—all of this.She said you were looking to hire.”
Bafflement crossed his face.
“I’m not looking to hire anybody.”He frowned as he said it though.“I mean.God knows I need to.But I haven’t thought about it, yet.I only told Rose yesterday morning that I was drowning in paperwork.I haven’t gotten as far as deciding what to do about it.”
And there it was.The hook, the catch, the seam she’d known had to be somewhere in it.There was no job.Rose had taken one look at the broke widow choking down free eggs and manufactured her a charity position out of a man’s idle complaint.And now she was standing in a stranger’s office uninvited, having announced herself as the answer to a question he hadn’t asked.
Heat climbed her neck, and she knew her fair skin was turning a blotchy red she couldn’t hide.
She knew better.Nothing this good ever fell into anyone’s lap.Not a cheap, affordable house, and not a job she was ideally suited for in some tiny town she just happened to be stranded and broke in.
She’d let one good supper and a porch full of laughing women talk her into hoping, which was the single most expensive and devastating thing a person in her position could do.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, in the smooth, bright, well-bred voice she kept for exactly these occasions, the one that could close a conversation faster than a cash drawer could slam shut.“There’s been a misunderstanding.I won’t take up any more of your time.”
She was already turning.She had a hand on the doorframe.
“Don’t,” he said.His voice wasn’t sharp.Just certain.The way he might say it to someone about to step off a curb in front of a truck they hadn’t seen.
She stopped.
“I am drowning,” he said simply.“That part’s true, whatever Rose did or didn’t decide on her own.I’ve practiced medicine for a decade and never once kept my own books.There was always somebody at the office who did it.Now there isn’t, and ...”
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.”
