The numbers locked into my mind the moment they appeared: 4, 12, 28, 35, 42. Mega Ball 11.
What stayed with me wasn’t excitement. It was silence.
No shouting. No laughter. No dramatic reaction—just the hum of a failing heater, the slow drip behind the basement wall, and the distant sound of a dinner party happening upstairs.
I sat alone in the basement of my parents’ house, in a neighborhood where everything looked perfect from the outside. My laptop rested on stacked cardboard boxes—one labeled in my mother’s handwriting: “Unimportant.”
It fit.
Upstairs, my family entertained guests. Executives. Politicians. People who mattered. My brother Jace laughed easily among them, exactly where he belonged.
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