It was a foolish little gesture, the kind you make when life feels so tight around your throat that you need to imagine one window opening somewhere. That night, I checked the drawing without much hope.
When I saw all six numbers match, I thought I had misunderstood. Then I turned on the television. Then I checked the official website. Then I sat on the floor of my apartment, with the overdue electric bill lying on the table, and began to shake.
The next day, I didn’t go to the accounting firm where I worked sixty hours a week while my boss claimed my ideas as his own. Instead, I went to see an attorney, Diane Whitaker, a specialist in trusts. She explained how to claim the prize without turning my name into a public spectacle. Then she said something that stayed lodged inside me:
“Money doesn’t change people, Madison. It just removes the mask.”
I already knew a few masks. My brother Brandon had once asked me for 35,000 dollars to “save his business,” and later I saw him gambling online. My sister Natalie had owed me money since her wedding, yet she still kept buying designer bags.
My father lectured me about saving every time I lent him money. My mother cried whenever she needed something, then disappeared whenever I said I was exhausted. The only one who was different was my aunt Ellen, a retired teacher with diabetes, an apartment full of plants and secondhand books, and a car that sounded like a blender.
That was why I decided to test them. It wasn’t pretty. Jenna told me it was dangerous for my heart. But I needed to know if anyone would help me when they believed I had nothing left to offer.
I made up a story that the accounting firm had shut down because of fraud, that I wouldn’t receive my final month’s pay, and that I needed 50,000 dollars for rent, medication, and basic living expenses until I found work again.
