Seventy-one months. Two thousand nine hundred and eleven dollars.

I laid them out. I opened every one. And on every remittance slip, in the field marked OBLIGOR, was Logan Miller and an eight-digit number, and by about the fortieth I had stopped seeing his name at all and had started seeing the date stamps, which is how I noticed the thing I had not known.

The amount had changed. Twice.

In year three it went from thirty-eight dollars to forty-one, and in year five from forty-one to forty-four. Which means his prison wage went up. Which means he has been promoted twice in a laundry.

I sat at my table and understood that I had spent five years believing that drawer contained a monthly acknowledgment aimed at me, and that what it actually contained was a record of a man having an ordinary Tuesday in Petersburg, Virginia, for six years, and getting slightly better at his job.

Not one of those envelopes was about me. He almost certainly does not know the amount. It comes out before he sees it.