The Fortune Inside Me

Chapter 5 Check Your Vent

He stood there holding my ticket between two fingers, examining it the way he examined receipts he planned to dispute. My blood went so cold I could feel it in my teeth. For one terrible second I thought he knew. That somehow he had come back too, that he had lived the same future as Theo and driven out here to take back what was his.

He doesn't know, Theo said, fast and certain. Mom, breathe. Look at his face. He's not here for the ticket. He's here to feel tall.

Then Damian opened his mouth, and relief washed through me so fast my knees went soft.

"You know, you've been different these past two days." He turned the ticket over, unhurried. "I couldn't put my finger on it. And then I drive out to meet a contractor and I find my ex-wife at a lottery kiosk in the middle of nowhere, shaking over a play slip."

His eyes came up, and the contempt in them was almost lazy.

"Is this the plan, Nora? I freeze your cards, so you decide to gamble your way back to the top? Look at you. People like you don't win things. That's not how the world works."

Seven years, and he still talked to me the way you talk to an employee who failed probation.

Give me ten minutes alone in that head of his, Theo muttered. I would redecorate.

He wasn't reborn. He was just a bully doing cardio. He'd driven out here for whatever sleazy business he had in the county, spotted me through the window, and decided to amuse himself.

So I smiled at him. Big and bright and completely unbothered.

"You're right, Damian, people like me don't win things." I plucked the ticket out of his fingers before his brain caught up with his reflexes. "By the way, you might want to have someone look at the vent in your closet. I think I bumped the grille loose when I was packing."

He blinked. "What?"

My cab was still idling at the curb, the driver half asleep over his wheel. I was in the back seat with the door locked before Damian finished processing the sentence.

"What did you do to my closet?" He took a step after the car. "Nora! What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means go home and look," I called through the c***k in the window, and the cab pulled away, and in the mirror I watched my ex-husband standing in the dust of a county road. I will treasure the slow dawn of unease on his face for the rest of my natural life.

Mom. That was risky. What if he'd grabbed the ticket back?

"Then I'd have grabbed his tie and introduced his face to the door frame." My hands were shaking now that it was over. "He's going home, isn't he. Right now. Straight home to check."

Oh, absolutely. You put a worm in his ear and drove off. He'll tear that closet apart with his bare hands.

I kept my eyes on the side mirror the whole ride back, half expecting his car to swing in behind us. It never did. He had a more urgent appointment with a stepladder.

"Why was he even out here?" I asked, once my pulse dropped below emergency levels. "That contractor. What kind of business meeting happens next to a shuttered diner in the middle of nowhere?"

The kind you don't put in the company calendar, Theo said. The donor launders his sins through paper. Shell vendors, fake invoices, money that walks into one county and out of another. Out here nobody knows his face. Well. Almost nobody.

"You knew about this?"

I know everything he did after you died. He got sloppy once there was no one left to catch him. Mom, when this is over, we do more than take his money. We take his paper trail and gift wrap it.

I sat with that for the rest of the ride. Eighty million in my pocket and a federal case growing in my unborn son's memory. Some women get nesting instincts in the third trimester. I got a treasure map and an enemies list.

I slid the ticket into the inside pocket of my bag, zipped it, then held the whole bag in my lap with both arms. Forty minutes back to the hotel. Forty minutes for Damian to climb a stepladder, unscrew four screws, and put his hand on a duffel bag full of business biographies.

Right about now, Theo said dreamily, he's dragging the ladder into the closet. Now he's up it. Now the grille is off. Now he's reaching in, and something feels wrong, because the bag is the right weight but it doesn't clink the way it should. Now he's unzipping it.

"Stop." I was grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. "Don't narrate it. I want to savor it slowly."

The hotel came into view. I paid the driver, rode the elevator up, double locked the door, and put the ticket in the room safe. Then I took it out. Then I put it back and made myself walk away from it. Then I took it out again and checked the numbers against my phone one more time, because my hands needed something to do and my brain needed proof it hadn't dreamed the whole morning.

Three days. In three days a machine full of numbered balls was going to make me untouchable.

My phone started ringing.

Damian's name lit up the screen, and underneath the panic and the giddiness and the adrenaline still draining out of my fingertips, one clear thought rose to the surface of my mind.

Showtime.