At the roulette table he played the same five lucky numbers, three chips stacked on each square. Five, because that was the number of letters in his name; five numbers and three chips, because that’s how he used to play, how it used to work, how he lost respect for reality and moved through rituals towards the climactic moment, how his mind survived among hope and shame and the voices that told him he’d lose again. Other players leaned rigidly against the roulette table, the casino floor like one big messy board game.

As the croupier dragged away his chips, Lucky considered the changes that occurred when his marriage to Valia ended. He associated their separation with the beginning of his interest in gambling, of new friends, of card rooms above fruit shops. Friends was a strong word. Perhaps friendship hadn’t been important in his life: most of those men didn’t matter to Lucky. After his marriage ended he stopped paying full and pure attention to what was happening to him—his mind divided, back then, into two asymmetries, into the life he experienced every day and an unlived life in which he was still married. One life criticised the other.

After a while the spinning wheel sounded like a long snore. After an hour the game put Lucky into a sort of fugue state and he stopped watching the roulette wheel; he listened for the croupier to call the numbers. The pattern in the carpet began to look like stains. Then he did, the croupier, call Lucky’s number, and the table exploded into congratulations, all these strangers thrown into goodwill for the old bloke. ‘You won!’ said a young woman. ‘You massively won!’

The final station: a blackjack table. Lucky stacked his chips, his expectations tenacious and accelerating. If he’d had friends with him, kind Lucky-watchers, they would have advised him to safeguard himself, to go home with the $4000 or so he now carried in his pocket. By this stage of the night he was no longer aware of cautionary thoughts. Yesterday he’d worried over Emily and her questions about her father; now Lucky looked forward to seeing her again. She was the missing part of the story. She wanted to write about the franchise’s legacy but did not realise she was part of that legacy, that Ian Asquith’s seed money was the hard truth at the bottom of the business. Which didn’t mean Emily should know what her father had done.