I was tired and overwhelmed and I handed him the ticket.
I understood this was the mistake almost immediately. Not because anything was said, but because of what was not said, the specific quality of the silence that followed, the way my parents moved to the kitchen together and spoke in voices too low to hear clearly, the way my mother looked at me when she came back as though she were recalculating something.
I went to bed telling myself I was being paranoid.
At two in the morning I could not sleep, so I checked my bank account on my phone from the dark of my bedroom.
There was a transaction I did not recognize. A transfer, timestamped that evening. Not a large portion of the winnings, because the winnings had not yet been claimed, but a transfer from my existing account, the account that had my name and my Social Security number, into an account I had never opened.
