PART 1
“If my mom thinks I am dying, she will give me every last penny she has.”
Abigail Riley froze in front of room 12 at the St. Jude Community Hospital in Savannah. Inside her purse was a lottery ticket worth twenty million dollars. She had arrived determined to change the life of Spencer, her only son, but that sentence pierced her heart before she could even knock on the door.
The door was ajar. Spencer was on the phone with a woman and had put it on speakerphone.
“Does not your conscience bother you?” the woman asked.
“Sometimes,” Spencer replied, letting out a short laugh. “But my mom loves feeling indispensable, so I do not need to ask her for anything. I just tell her I am worried, and she finds a way to pay me back.”
Abigail tightened the strap of her bag as her hands began to shake.
For months she had sold jewelry, pawned her mother’s sewing machine, and taken out personal loans to pay for specialists, tests, and medications. The doctors assured her that Spencer could recover, but each relapse seemed to open a new hole in her finances.
That morning, as she checked the winning ticket numbers for the fifth time, she had imagined telling him by his bedside. She had wanted to whisper, “You will not have to worry about anything anymore, my son.”
Now she heard him planning how to spend a fortune whose existence he was still unaware of.
“When I get out of the hospital,” Spencer continued, “I will tell her I need to save my printing shop, and she will definitely pay the rent, buy another printer, and settle my credit cards because she always ends up solving everything for me.”
“What if her good news has nothing to do with you?” the woman on the phone asked.
Spencer laughed again. “Everything ends up having to do with me.”
Abigail felt like she could not breathe, so she leaned against the wall to keep from falling. At sixty, she was discovering that the son for whom she had given up so much did not see her sacrifices as love, but as a bank account without a password.
A nurse approached with a thick folder in her arms.
“Mrs. Riley, are you not coming in?” the nurse asked softly. “Your son has been asking for you for a while.”
Abigail forced her lips into a calm smile. “I left some documents in the car, honey, so I will be right back.”
She walked to the elevator without looking back once. When she reached the parking garage, she got into her old Ford sedan, took out her ticket, and double checked the combination.
There was no mistake. She owned enough money to buy houses, businesses, and amenities for several generations.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket.
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.
