The woman who minutes ago had been crying, begging and calling Barry every terrible name in the world, preceded by a cuss word, ran around the car to fall at his side. The crowd surrounded him in two seconds after he landed, which even at this distance sounded bad, very bad.

Before he disappeared behind the wall of people, William caught sight of his body, still as a fallen tree on the black road surface. From the angle of his legs, in relation to his waist, he imagined if Barry survived, he wouldn’t be dragging anyone down a street for a very long time.

“Oh my God,” William said, looking at once to Orelia to offer comfort. But she didn’t appear upset. In fact, she smiled. He’d thought then this was her behavior when in shock. Some people laugh when they’re scared or worried, but smiling was an incongruent response to this unfolding horror. And that’s why his memory had failed him on the book.

Her odd smile, the unsettling Hell Hounds fight, Barry the asshole flying over the car’s roof to land with a clunk, these images stayed with him for days. No doubt his brain’s way of protecting him from trauma.

But he remembered now as he stared at those words.

Thank you for the luck.

She had worn the same expression on her face as she did after their argument, when she’d told him he’d be sorry. Others might describe her smile as one of satisfaction. He saw more. That smile, was one of wicked triumph.

Thank you for the luck.

Yes, things had become clearer. The puzzle pieces still didn’t fit, but at least he believed that he knew roughly where they should go. Around her and her balance sheet of sorts book, people came into unforeseen bad fortune. His next move was obvious. He must get his hands on that book.

He slipped the note into his pants’ pocket and walked back to where he’d parked the car, more assured than he’d felt in a long time.

57

The day Nem was to meet the person who would change her life had been heading toward her like a bullet. She sensed this as she always did when she used the book. It seemed a small decision to make use of the luck thing to find someone with experience to guide her. This, she thought, would still not muddy the waters of the question of her talent.

Since the timing of fortune’s arrival was never certain, she kept a vigilant lookout for signs of the final ingredient to assure her future as an author. Luck delivered them to her two days after she’d jotted her request in the diary.

If you asked whose luck she’d swapped for this, Nem couldn’t say, because over the months she’d built a backlog of entries marked with a minus. This was her security against an unknown future and she’d possibly also become a little too enthusiastic at dishing out punishment. Bad luck names now filled a full page with no coinciding balance of good fortune entries marked with a plus sign.