Ruth has tapped folders twice for as long as I have known her, a small ritual from a lifetime at a public counter, and ordinarily it is the most reassuring sound in the world, the sound of a person who keeps records straight for a living.

That season it became something more.

Every time she tapped a folder before opening it, I understood that she was about to show me a thing she could not say out loud — that the taps were her way of handing me the facts and keeping her own hands clean of the accusation, letting the dates speak so that she would not have to.

A clerk cannot call a man a thief across her own counter.