Paul held the dummy against the window and said her name once. Tess looked up from the map key. Sunlight passed through the sheet, bringing a second set of figures into the space beneath Vermont. They were not page coordinates.
She recognized the settlement estimate before she could read the total. Their mother's address ran backward above it. Below were the proposed divisions, Paul's forwarded rental address, and a note about money he had advanced for repairs.
"How many?" he asked.
Tess stood. The chair rolled into a box of outdated telephone directories. She took the proof, turned it over, and saw the old household printout clearly. The map side had looked blank enough under the overhead lights.
"How many copies, Tess?"
"Four numbered dummies. This is two."
"And the first one?"
She opened the shared household folder in her lower drawer. The settlement pages had been there with duplicates of utility statements and insurance correspondence. She had gathered a stack for scrap while clearing her work surface. The back sides were clean. That had been the extent of her attention.
Paul reached for the folder. She kept one hand on it while she remembered the proofs. Joan had one. The copy desk had another. The fourth was with the advertising manager, who needed to know where the spread began.
"Don't," he said.
She let go.
He did not raise his voice. He put the folder beneath his arm and waited beside her desk. That was worse than having him shout across the room. The Ledger went on around them: a keyboard rattling, an unanswered extension, someone laughing at a headline Tess could not see.
She retrieved Joan's copy first. Joan had marked a question beside the appeal box. Tess explained the paper problem and asked whether anyone else had handled it. Joan said no, handed it over, and turned it face down without reading the reverse.
"Bring me a clean one before five."
At the copy desk, the proof lay beneath a dictionary and a half-eaten pear. The copy editor had seen show-through and assumed it was a printer test. He had not passed it on. Tess took the sheet and the penciled corrections, transferring each mark to her notebook before moving away.
The advertising manager was out.
His desk held a stack of rate cards, a broken umbrella, and three mugs with different levels of dried coffee. Tess could not see the numbered dummy. She telephoned him and heard traffic on the line. He had taken a sales folder to an appointment.
"Is my proof in it?"
Paper moved near his receiver. Tess waited with her free hand flat against the empty place on his desk. Paul stood at the end of the aisle, the household folder pressed against his ribs.
"No," the advertising manager said. "I left it under the blue binder. Needed the desk space."
She lifted the binder. Number four lay underneath, folded once, her mother's address inside. She asked whether he had shown it to anyone. He had not. She thanked him, then checked the four numbers against the list on her pad.
Paul counted them himself.
"There weren't extras?"
"Four. I ran them myself."
They checked the nearby wastebasket and the printer tray. Tess found a fifth sheet, an abandoned first-page test with no map and no household figures. She added it to the pile anyway. Paul watched until the surfaces were clear.
She printed replacements on clean stock, one at a time, checking both sides. The color proofer's counter clicked through the job. She entered the charge on her personal account and wrote the amount in her checkbook before she could persuade herself to forget it.
The spoiled sheets went into a plain envelope. Paul wanted them shredded; Tess agreed. They stood beside the office machine while it reduced the first sheet to strips. It overheated on the third. They waited for the red light to go out.
"Mother would've kept the good side," Tess said.
"Mother didn't have a circulation department."
The machine started again. Tess fed the remaining sheets slowly. When it finished, she pulled the bin out and mixed the strips with the earlier waste. Paul did not tell her that was enough.
Back at her desk, she surrendered the insurance envelopes, the repair receipts, and the spare house key she had clipped inside the folder. He would bring anything requiring her signature. She would no longer keep the originals at work.
Paul squared the papers against his palm and closed the folder. Then he carried their mother's financial life away from Tess's desk.