“You brought the pay stubs,” Tom said.

I handed him the thick envelope.

He took out the printed sheets from my dental office, the extra Saturday shifts in Hastings, and Luke’s county shop wages.

Tom arranged the papers in two neat columns beside his keyboard.

“You saved exactly seventy-one thousand four hundred dollars,” Tom said.

“Every penny we had left over,” I said.

“That’s a huge amount of cash for two working people to stack up in four years.”

He didn’t look happy about it.