My trailer had one bedroom, and I started to use it for my collection. I slept in the large recliner in my living room instead. In the bedroom—which I kept locked, and only unlocked to visit reverently, as if it were a museum—I displayed my finds: a couple of posters, and some Topps playing cards that I arranged inside a large frame, the various articles and paper items either framed and hung or placed inside marked file folders that I kept on a bookshelf. Finally, in each corner of the room I hung a couple of festive T-shirts that bore the Three’s Company logo.

I didn’t dare wear any of the shirts out of the house, though. I didn’t want anyone commenting on them and breaking the spell. The last thing I needed was some idiot approaching me in the middle of the hardware store or wherever and hee-hawing at me, Hey, I love that show, too! I didn’t want to meet anyone like me. I needed to believe that my peculiar fixation was mine and mine alone. Over the years I’d come to understand that my interests lay beyond a secret, private window in my brain, and when someone else came to know them they put fingerprints on the glass, smearing and spoiling the view forever. Immediately I’d want to smash the window, murder everything beyond it, then annihilate myself for such carelessness. So many ideas and dreams had died this way, by becoming known by others. I was determined to keep this one alive.

People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject. The subject looms before you like a bright city on the horizon, beckoning you forward. And you’re forever living in it, or going toward it.

About a year before I won the lottery, I discovered, accidentally, that Krystal was squatting at Geannie and Jim’s house on and off. For the past few years a FOR SALE sign had sat in the front yard, but like most of the houses in the area, it had never found a buyer. One of Jim’s estranged sisters whom I’d never seen had inherited it due to a will he had drawn up years ago and, in a surprising twist for such a meticulous man, never updated. Yet, for the past five years Krystal kept intercepting the power bills in the mail and paying them, and possibly the water bill, too—she had a good job as a dental hygienist in the next town over, with money to blow.

The house was on my way to work, and one night while driving in on the late shift I’d noticed Krystal’s car parked in the driveway. It was almost 9:30 p.m. on an October night, and I could see a light on in the living room and in an upstairs room, the one where Geannie had kept her Beanie Babies. When I passed it on my way home, Krystal’s car was still there.