Chapter 3 - The Six Numbers
The rain was still hammering the glass when I got back to my small, rented apartment above my nursery office. It was a modest space—exposed brick, a jungle of hanging pothos and monsteras, and the steady, comforting hum of grow lights keeping my indoor lemon tree alive through the winter.
I tossed my keys onto the wooden entryway table and dropped my canvas bag beside the door.
My eyes fell on the kitchen counter.
There it sat. The ridiculous little piece of pink-and-white thermal paper my family had used as a punch line between bites of turkey and boasts about luxury cruises.
“This feels more appropriate for your situation, Audrey.”
I let out a single, humorless breath that sounded like a dry leaf scraping across concrete.
Almost out of spite—not hope, not greed, but a petty, burning desire to see if the universe had any sense of dark irony left—I picked up a nickel from the tray by the door and scratched at the foil coating.
The gray film curled away under the edge of the coin, revealing a row of small, neat digits.
I didn’t pay attention at first. I was thinking about Grandma Grace’s signature, about the tremble in her hand, about Diana’s texts glowing on Marlene’s phone.
Then my eyes registered the first number.
14.
I stopped scratching. My heart gave a sudden, heavy thud against my ribs, like a fist hitting a locked door.
I cleared the rest of the film with my thumb.
14 - 22 - 38 - 45 - 51 - Mega Ball 07.
I blinked. I walked over to my desk, grabbed my laptop, opened a new browser tab, and pulled up the official state lottery results page for the drawing held the previous Tuesday—the drawing my mother had casually mentioned buying the ticket for while standing in line for instant coffee at the Sunoco.
I stared at the winning numbers listed on the glowing screen.
Then I looked back down at the ticket in my hand.
The first matched.
Then the second.
Then the third.
By the time the sixth number matched, my lungs seemed to forget how to pull in air. The room around me—the bookshelves lined with horticultural guides, the damp smell of potting soil from the greenhouse downstairs, the distant roar of traffic on the bypass—all of it vanished.
There was only the silence of the room and the glowing blue pixels on my screen.
Jackpot Winner: Single Ticket Sold at Sunoco Station #412.
Estimated Cash Value: $87,400,000.
Eighty-seven million dollars.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t jump up and down or throw my arms in the air like people do in commercials.
I just sat down slowly in my worn leather desk chair, holding the little strip of paper between two fingers as if it were a lit stick of dynamite that might go off if I breathed too hard.
I refreshed the browser page twice.
Same result.
Eighty-seven million.
Enough to pay off every mortgage in my neighborhood. Enough to buy out my father’s debts ten times over. Enough to hire the best forensic accountants, the most ruthless real estate litigators, and a security detail for Grandma Grace.
Or... enough to watch them hang themselves with the very rope they had braided for me.
I didn’t call my parents. I didn’t call Vivien. I didn’t even call Aunt Marlene.
I folded the thermal paper in half, placed it carefully inside the pages of an old, leather-bound copy of Gray’s Manual of Botany, and closed the cover with a soft, final thud.
Then I turned off my desk lamp, walked over to my bedroom window, and watched the taillights of cars streak through the rainy night.
May you like
They were packing their bags for the Caribbean. They were checking their itineraries, arguing over shore excursions, and dreaming of the day they would cash out my grandmother’s house to fund their miserable, shallow lives.
They had no idea that the punch line was about to walk through the front door.
