Fifty Million Reasons to Walk Away

Summary

The lottery ticket in my breast pocket felt like a brand-new heart, fluttering with fifty million dollars’ worth of impossible hope.

I had boarded the red-eye out of Chicago with nothing but a carry-on, a worn leather jacket, and the singular, desperate urge to save my wife. Three years ago, Lydia and I sat in a sterile county clerk’s office and signed an uncontested dissolution of marriage. A paper divorce. A desperate gambit, or so she had sworn to me through racking sobs.