The ticket was a birthday thing, the kind of small, throwaway gesture that people make when they do not know what else to give someone. My coworker Dana had pressed it into my hand in the break room with a card and a cupcake and the cheerful disclaimer that she never won anything on these but maybe I would.
I scratched it in my car during lunch. I looked at the numbers for a long time before I accepted what they said. Then I drove back inside and sat at my desk for the rest of the afternoon not doing any actual work, the ticket in my pocket, running the numbers again in my head like someone who expects them to change.
They did not change.
Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after taxes. Real money. Life-altering money. The kind of money that could clear the student loans that had been following me like a shadow for six years, replace the car with the transmission problem I had been nursing through two winters, and finally do something about Grandpa Walter’s house.
