Thursday came slower than Ren expected and faster than he was ready for.
He walked to Nassar's office alone this time. Hamu's back had genuinely given out by then, or so he claimed, though Ren suspected the old man was just as happy to let someone else carry both the ledgers and whatever risk came with them. Ren didn't mind. Fewer eyes on him meant fewer questions later.
The office looked different in daylight, smaller somehow, the stacks of paper more obviously chaotic than they'd seemed the first time. A clerk named Denny, thin and nervous in a way that suggested he'd been thin and nervous long before this job, showed Ren to a small table in the corner and handed him a stack of receipts without much explanation.
"Check the totals against the ledger," Denny said. "Flag anything that doesn't match. Mr. Nassar doesn't like surprises."
It was simple work, the kind Ren could do with half his attention while the other half wandered. Add, compare, flag, move to the next page. He fell into a rhythm quickly, and for the first hour nothing about the job resembled the world he was actually trying to get close to. Just numbers. Ordinary numbers, belonging to a fish market, a tailor, a man who ran a small fleet of delivery bicycles.
Then, a little past noon, he opened a folder that wasn't ordinary at all.
It was thinner than the others, and the handwriting on the entries was different, tighter, older, the kind that belonged to someone who'd stopped writing that carefully years ago. The account holder's name had been blacked out with a thick pen stroke, but whoever had done it had pressed hard enough that Ren could still make out the shape of the letters underneath if he tilted the page toward the window.
He didn't need to read the name to know whose folder it was. He already knew the numbers. He'd known them for weeks, run them so many times in his head that seeing them written in someone else's hand felt less like discovery and more like recognition, the way you recognize a face you've only ever seen in a photograph.
His father's loan.
Ren sat very still for a moment, the folder open in front of him, Denny two tables away and not paying attention, the fan overhead turning too slowly to matter. Someone had gone to the trouble of blacking out the name. That meant someone had decided this particular account needed to be less visible than the others, which meant someone, somewhere, already understood there might be a problem with it.
He flipped to the next page and found something he hadn't expected. A second entry, dated only three days ago, well after Voss's death, adjusting the interest downward. Not erasing the debt. Just quietly correcting it, bringing the rate back to something closer to what an honest lender might actually charge.
Someone already knew the loan had been rigged. And someone, very recently, had started fixing it.
Ren's mind moved fast now, faster than the numbers themselves, chasing the only question that mattered. Who. Who had access to this folder, who had the authority to alter it, and who would have a reason to quietly correct a wrong that nobody outside this room was even supposed to know existed.
"Something wrong?"
Denny's voice, closer than Ren expected. He'd crossed the room without Ren noticing, and now stood just behind his shoulder, looking down at the open folder with an expression Ren couldn't quite read.
Ren closed it slowly, careful not to look like he was hiding anything, though every part of him wanted to. "No. Just double checking a total that looked off."
Denny held out his hand for the folder. Ren gave it to him without arguing, because arguing would have told Denny more than the folder itself could.
"That one's not for the general stack," Denny said, tucking it under his arm. "You shouldn't have had it in the first place. Someone must have mixed the piles."
"Sorry. I'll be more careful."
Denny studied him for a beat too long, then nodded and walked the folder back toward Nassar's private desk, setting it in a drawer Ren hadn't even noticed before, one with a small brass lock hanging open on the front.
Ren went back to his ordinary receipts and finished the rest of the afternoon without incident, though his mind never fully returned to the fish market and the tailor and the bicycles. It stayed on that folder, on the blacked-out name, on the correction dated three days after Voss had died.
Someone inside this operation was already trying to quietly right a wrong that Ren had spent weeks discovering on his own. That meant one of two things, and both of them mattered enormously. Either someone with real power over these books had a conscience Ren hadn't accounted for, or someone had a reason of their own for wanting Voss's old debts cleaned up before anyone came looking too closely at how they'd been built in the first place.
He walked home as the sun went down, turning both possibilities over and over, and by the time he reached his own street he still hadn't decided which one frightened him more.