It had taken me three hours to make that cake.
Vanilla sponge with citrus zest because my mother used to pretend, when guests were around, that lemon was her favorite. Buttercream done by hand because the mixer in the basement kitchen nook had been broken for six months and nobody cared enough to replace it. A simple sugar decoration at the top. No bakery label. No prestige. Just effort. The kind of effort families are supposed to understand as love even when it arrives without frosting roses and ribboned boxes.
She had thrown it away like I had handed her garbage.
Helena stepped into the kitchen behind me and followed my gaze to the trash.
Her expression changed, very slightly.
“Homemade?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stood there a moment longer, then said, “I take back every charitable thought I almost had.”
That got a sound out of me after all. A short laugh, sharp as broken glass.
We went downstairs.
The basement stairs had always smelled faintly damp no matter the season. Three years of bleach, dehumidifiers, and careful cleaning had never quite beaten back the mildew in the walls. The ceiling was low enough that Jace used to joke I belonged down there with the spiders and storage bins. My parents called it an apartment whenever they wanted to sound generous to outsiders and “the basement” whenever they wanted to remind me where I ranked.
My room—if you were being kind enough to call it that—sat behind a folding partition near the old furnace. One narrow bed. A dresser rescued from Grandpa’s house before they sold it. A desk I’d bought secondhand and refinished myself. A portable wardrobe. Shelves of books. A kettle. Two framed photographs, both of Grandpa. One from before I enlisted, him on the porch in his brown jacket. One from the county fair, both of us eating pie off paper plates like it was serious work.
The movers stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked around.
One of them, a broad-shouldered man with tattooed forearms, went very still when he saw the space.
“Everything here?” he asked quietly.
I nodded.
He glanced once toward the stairs, then back at me. His mouth flattened. “We’ll be quick.”
I had lived there three years with $280 million tucked behind trusts, entities, and lawyers so airtight the state could have pried on me with explosives and still come away confused.
People imagine money creates immediate pleasure.
Sometimes it creates privacy first.
And privacy, for someone raised the way I was, can feel holier than luxury.
Three years earlier, on a Tuesday so dull it seemed designed not to attract memory, I had stopped at a gas station on the way to work and bought a lottery ticket because the jackpot had gotten so absurd people at Intrepid were talking about it while I emptied trash bins. One of the junior developers said if he won he’d buy an island. Another said he’d quit by email with a single middle finger emoji. My father, who happened to be walking through the lobby when they were joking, snorted and said men with no discipline only fantasized about free money because they lacked the grit to earn real success.
That was Malcolm Soryn in one sentence.
I bought the ticket anyway.
Not because I believed.
Because sometimes even invisible men want ten dollars’ worth of alternate physics.
I checked the numbers the next morning in the supply closet on the third floor, leaning against a shelf of paper towels while the fluorescent light buzzed overhead. At first I thought I’d read them wrong. Then I checked again. Then again. Then I slid to a crouch on the concrete floor because the room had started tilting and I was afraid if I stayed standing I might black out and hit my head on industrial shelving before I even had time to become rich.
Four.
Twelve.
Twenty-eight.
Thirty-five.
Forty-two.
Mega Ball eleven.
