And I have a job.

It’s a veterans’ legal aid nonprofit in Silver Spring with eleven employees and a photocopier that jams, and I do forensic accounting — benefits denials, disability offsets, servicemembers who’ve been quietly underpaid for nine years by an error nobody will admit to.

No clearance required. Everything I touch is unclassified, and most of it is a spreadsheet, and it turns out that the skill that hid forty-five million dollars is the same skill that finds four thousand.

A woman came in last week. Twenty-nine, medically retired, convinced she was owed something and unable to prove it, apologizing for taking my time.

I turned the monitor toward her and pulled up eleven years of her own pay records, and I said the thing my father used to say, and for the first time in my life I said it to somebody small, about something small, and meant it all the way down.

*Liars deal in words. Truth deals in data. Let’s go look.*