The Fortune Inside Me

Chapter 4 Twenty Dollars

The county courthouse was doing a brisk trade in human misery that morning, and Damian looked like the one man in the building having the best day of his life. His hair was slicked back, his shoes shone, and hanging off his arm was Sienna Vaughn in a dress so tight her baby bump arrived in the lobby two seconds before the rest of her.

She saw me standing alone and covered her mouth with her hand, delighted.

"Oh, honey. You look terrible. Don't tell me you spent the night under an overpass."

Damian gave her a pat and put on his magnanimous face. "Be nice. You know how fragile Nora is. Say the wrong thing and she'll be back on that bridge."

He said it with a little smile, about the night I nearly died. I filed it away. There was going to be an accounting for all of it.

Then he turned to me. "You brought everything? Let's get this done. I have a company to run."

I didn't answer either of them. Seven years earlier we had come to this same building for our marriage license. Damian forgot his wallet that day and I paid the fee, and he laughed and said he owed me one. He never paid it back.

I walked in, sat where the clerk told me to sit, and signed every page she put in front of me without a word. The clerk glanced at me with something soft when she thought I wasn't looking. Pregnant woman, husband's girlfriend waiting outside. It didn't take a detective.

Damian signed his side with a flourish, practically grinning at the pen. When the clerk stamped the decree, he exhaled so deeply it was obscene, the sound of a man setting down a load he'd spent two years pretending was heavy.

Outside on the steps, Sienna pulled him into a kiss that was entirely for my benefit.

"Baby, we're finally free. Let's go celebrate."

"Anything you want," he said, and then he remembered I existed. He dug out his wallet, peeled off two crumpled twenties, and tossed them onto the steps at my feet.

"For a cab. Nobody can say Damian Cross doesn't take care of his obligations."

The bills fluttered down onto the concrete. A few people on the steps turned to watch. I bent down slowly, and out of the corner of my eye I saw both of them smiling, already savoring the sight of his ex-wife picking his money up off the ground.

I tied my shoelace. Then I stood up, put my heel squarely on the two bills, and ground them into the step.

"Keep it, Damian. Buy yourself a doctor." I looked him up and down. "You have the face of a man with bad luck coming."

Someone on the steps laughed. Not at me.

His face went green. "Nora, you ungrateful..."

"Who are you cursing at?" Sienna shrieked.

I was already in a cab, already gone.

That was beautiful, Theo said. The shoe thing. Ten out of ten.

My hands were sweating through my victory, though. "Son, what happens when he opens that vent and finds your college fund replaced with business books?"

So what if he does? The decree is signed. The settlement says in writing that each party keeps their personal items, no claims on anything the other side walked out with. That gold left his house in your suitcase as a personal item. And what's he going to do, call the police and explain that his ex-wife stole four million in assets he siphoned out of his own company? He'd be confessing to fraud in the same sentence he reported the theft.

I slapped my knee. The driver glanced at me in the mirror.

"He has to eat it. He has to just sit there and eat it."

Exactly. It's the most expensive meal of his life and he doesn't even know he's chewing. Now, important business. The ticket.

Right. The ticket. Eighty million dollars, sitting out there waiting for someone to pick the right numbers, and my unborn son knew all of them.

There's a little kiosk out by the old county road, nowhere near anywhere he'd ever go. We buy it today, we keep it somewhere safe, and then we wait.

"And you're completely sure about the numbers?"

Mom. In the last timeline, a homeless guy bought that exact ticket at that exact kiosk, celebrated too early, and lost it in a gutter outside a bar. The donor found it, waited until the heat died down, and claimed the prize himself. He never even earned his own miracle. He picked it up off the street. That money built everything he became. This time it builds us.

The cab merged onto the county road. The driver asked twice if I was sure about the address. I was sure. Outside the window the city thinned into scrubland and gas stations, and up ahead I could see the little kiosk crouched beside a shuttered diner, its lottery sign buzzing in the morning light.

The kiosk smelled like cigarettes and old coffee, and the man behind the counter looked at my belly and then at my face, deciding which one to be polite to.

"Five quick picks, please," I said.

No! Mom, not quick picks. I'll give you the numbers. Write them down.

I fumbled my phone out and opened the notes app.

Five, twelve, nineteen, twenty-six, thirty-one. And fourteen for the Mega Ball. Don't mix them up.

"Sorry," I told the clerk. "Change of plans. I want to pick my own."

He slid a play slip across the counter and watched me fill in the little bubbles with the focus of a woman defusing a bomb. When the ticket printed, he handed it over with the same disinterest he gave everyone, and I stood there holding a slip of paper worth more than the building, more than the block, more than my entire marriage had ever been.

It felt hotter than the gold. I don't know how paper manages that, but it did.

"You're completely sure this hits?" I whispered.

It hits. Three days from now. Eighty million, single winner. And that winner is going to be you.

I was halfway to the door, already mentally picking out a house with a moat, when the ticket was ripped straight out of my hand.

I spun around.

Damian.