"You owe who?" Gracelyn said, lifting the handset.
Her mother's face—already thin from worry—went a shade paler, as if someone had siphoned color from her cheeks. Marjorie Perrin gripped the banister with both hands and tried to smile. It came out like a cough.
"It's the bank," Marjorie heard the caller say and immediately translated it into catastrophe. "They say there's been... an error. Taxes. Collections. They want to—"
Gracelyn let the word hang. The caller ID on the cottage-style wall phone had flashed URGENT in fat black letters. Marjorie had never liked that word. Neither did Gracelyn. She stepped closer, the handset warm against her ear, and watched her mother shrink.
"Who are they asking for?" Gracelyn asked, voice flat, testing.
Marjorie swallowed. "They said—calloway—no—Simpson? No. They said—" She stammered. Her knuckles whitened on the wood rail. "They said payments are overdue on the—on the properties."
Gracelyn clicked her tongue. She had the thin rectangle of the lottery ticket folded in the back pocket of her jeans. She had bought it on a dare, on a mercy impulse: a five-dollar scratch-off at the corner bodega after delivering lunch to the hospital. She had checked the numbers in the supermarket aisle and laughed until she cried. The bank notification had been a separate thing, an email she had opened with the same casual curiosity—ten million dollars, the bank’s standard-looking notice: Deposit confirmed. Lotteries processed. She
