“I hope I can find the ticket.”
“You lost it already? That was quick, even for you.”
“I mean, I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” he says, waving a hand, and I glance around at the place, the tables and counters cleared off and wiped down, the floors mostly spotless and the garbage bags lined up near the door, ready to be taken out.
“It’s fine,” I say with a shrug, because ticket or not, the odds are against us. “Do you have any idea what the statistical probability of winning the lottery is?”
He shakes his head.
“I don’t either,” I admit. “But I once read that you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning or being attacked by a shark or becoming president one day.”
Teddy laughs. “So…pretty likely.”
“You have a better chance of being killed by a falling vending machine too.”
“Now,thatseems totally possible,” he says, turning back to the TV as the weekend anchor, a young woman with close-cut dark hair, returns to the screen.
“Lottery officials have confirmed there were three winning tickets sold in last night’s four-hundred-twenty-four-million-dollar Powerball jackpot,” she begins, and I find myself walking over to the living room so I can hear better, feeling kind of ridiculous even as I do. “And you could be a winner if you bought yours in Florida, or Oregon, or right here in Chicago.” The image changes to show a small shop with a red awning. “The lucky local has yet to come forward, but the winning ticket was sold at Smith’s Market in Lincoln Park.”
My mouth falls open.
“Isn’t that place right by you?” Teddy asks, turning around, and when he sees my face, his eyes widen. “Wait, that’s where you bought it? Whoa. Maybe we really are millionaires.”
On the screen, they’re now showing footage of the man from the store, the one who helped me fill in the numbers just last night. But too quickly they switch back to the newscaster. “Elsewhere, the owner of a winning ticket sold in Oregon has chosen to remain anonymous, and a third ticket holder in Florida has yet to come forward. Last night’s jackpot was the seventh-largest in Powerball history at a whopping four hundred twenty-four million dollars. The winners will split the pot three ways for a pretax total of 141.3 million dollars each, which can of course be taken as a lump sum or split into annual payments.”
Teddy is standing up now. “There’s no way.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head.
“I seriously have no idea where the ticket is,” he says, half-laughing as the shot pans out on-screen to include the weatherman, the two of them bantering about how they wished they’d thought to buy a ticket. “Do you remember the numbers?”
I don’t answer, my eyes still glued to the TV. It would be easier to tell him they were random, that they didn’t mean anything, that none of this did. The only way he’d find out is if we won. Ifhewon. And the odds of that are absurd.
But I don’t want to pretend anymore. And so I nod.
“Yes,” I say quietly, just as the newscaster turns back to the camera.
“And those numbers, again,” she says, “were twenty-four…”
Teddy raises his eyebrows. “My lucky number.”
“Eight…”
“Your birthday.”
“Thirty-one…”
He looks a little pale now. “And mine.”
“Nine…”
Before he can even ask, I say, “When we met.”
“Eleven…”
At this he crinkles his brow.
“Your apartment,” I whisper, my heart racing.
