He wanted someone with an auditor’s eye to have them.”

I opened the third one.

Maintenance times, room visits, bin locations, four-digit numbers in a tidy column, and my own name in the margin on a Tuesday in March.

Then a page with a column labeled CLAIM ACCT.

Thirty lines.

A running total at the bottom: one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars.

“Say that number out loud for me,” I said.

“One hundred eighty-four thousand dollars,” Liam said.