Safe from whom, I asked.

He looked at me for a long second.

“From confusion,” he said.

It would be days before I understood that the confusion he meant to protect the folder from was mine.

Chapter 5 — The Recorded Amount

The next morning I went to the county records office, where Ruth had the property record waiting on the counter.

Ruth and I have known each other since we were girls; she has worked at that counter for twenty years, and she taps a folder twice before she opens it, the way some people knock on a door.

She tapped it twice.