Spencer sent a text: “Where are you? You said you had good news.”
Abigail wrote back: “There is a lot of traffic, so we will talk later.”
Then she turned off her phone completely. For the first time in thirty-four years, she did not run when her son called her.
Instead of returning to the hospital, she drove to her small house in the Pinecrest neighborhood. She placed the ticket on the wooden table where she had counted coins to pay Spencer’s debts and stared at it for several minutes.
She could collect the prize, give him a share, and pretend she had not heard a thing. That was what the old Abigail would have done.
However, something had broken behind that hospital door.
She opened a blank notebook and wrote three questions. How much has he lied to me? How much money did he take from me? How far would I be willing to go if I knew I had won?
Before finishing the third question, she received a message from an unknown number.
“Mrs. Riley, please do not tell Spencer about the lottery yet because there is something much worse that you need to know.”
The signature at the bottom read: Naomi.
Abigail understood that the hospital conversation had barely opened the first crack in her life.
