Stacks of hundred-dollar bills, banded in neat bundles, filling the lower half of the case — easily two hundred thousand dollars, more money than I had ever seen in one place outside of a photograph.

It sat there in the dim bedroom light, obscene and ordinary all at once.

That is the thing about a great deal of cash in a small space.

It does not look like power or like crime.

It looks like paper.

It looks almost boring, stacked and banded and silent, and only when you understand what it had to do to arrive in that box does the air around it seem to change temperature.

But I was an auditor, and I knew that cash is never the point.