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,wayover 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.”
