Through the rest of December I kept two stacks of paper on my desk, and neither of them told the truth by itself. One was Inez's Dacre Meridian statements, four years of tidy columns showing contributions and a balance that climbed like a conjuring trick. The other was her bank records, the actual wire transfers she'd sent, smaller and plainer than the statement totals by a wide margin.
"The balance isn't the same as what you put in," I told her one evening, the two of us hunched over the kitchen table in my house because the greenhouse office was too cold to sit in past six. "Your statement says you're up almost sixty percent. Your bank account says you sent in eleven thousand over four years."
"So what's the number," she said. "The real one."
"Eleven thousand is the number that's real. The rest was never money. It was ink." I hated saying it. I'd quoted that fictitious growth to her myself, more than once, proud of a return I hadn't understood well enough to question.
News reports through January started drawing a line I hadn't thought to draw. Dacre Meridian Securities, it turned out, ran a legitimate trading desk alongside the advisory arm Celia had personally built and personally corrupted. Employees who processed trades, who answered phones, who filed paperwork for the honest side of the firm, were not the same as the hands that had cooked Inez's statements.
"I wanted to blame all of them," I admitted to her. "The kid who told me withdrawals were frozen. I wanted it to be his fault too."
"Was it?"
"No. He probably didn't know any more than we did." It cost me something to say that, because blanket anger had been easier to carry than the specific kind, the kind that pointed back at my own recommendation.
We spent three evenings reconstructing what we could verify: her deposits, mine, the dates, the wire confirmations, cross-checked against whatever the receivership notices made public. It wasn't recovery. It was accounting, which felt smaller and less satisfying and was the only thing either of us could actually do in January.
I called the propane company's billing office and asked, for the first time in thirty years of running this place, for a payment plan. A woman named Darlene listened, typed for a while, and offered six months at a higher rate with a lien on noncompliance. I asked her to repeat the first payment date while I wrote it on the wall calendar. Then I read the amount back. It left less for everything else, but it was an amount I could move from the operating account without waiting on Dacre. "Send the agreement," I said. Before hanging up, I asked whether delivery would continue while I signed it. She checked. Yes. I took it. It wasn't dignity. It was heat.
Then I called a commercial broker about the north propagation wing, the one standing empty since we'd consolidated growing into the newer benches. Six thousand square feet, its own loading door, a shared boiler line I didn't think twice about at the time. I told him to list it.
"Eleven thousand first," I told Inez when the listing went live, showing her the broker's paperwork. "Whatever this wing brings, your eleven comes off the top before I touch a dollar of it for the fuel contract or anything else."
She read the listing twice, slower than she needed to, the kind of careful reading that meant she didn't fully trust the promise yet even as she was choosing to let it stand. "That's the actual number now," she said. "Eleven. Not sixty percent of something that was never there."
"That's the actual number," I agreed, and for the first time since the radio announcement, I felt like I was standing on ground instead of ice, even if the ground was smaller and colder than I'd believed it to be a month before.