That was when Lonnie came in.

The instant he saw the money, his whole face changed.

“What’s all that?” “I found it in the flour tin.” He looked at the cash a long moment.

Then he shrugged.

“Probably grocery money she forgot about.”

But I had seen his face in the half-second before the shrug, and the shrug did not match it.

When a person is truly surprised by a pile of money, there’s a beat of pure astonishment before anything else — the eyebrows, the open mouth, the what on earth. Lonnie skipped that beat.

His face went straight past surprise to something guarded and quick, the face of a man doing math, and only afterward did he arrange it into the easy shrug and reach for a careless explanation.