Of course, it wasn’t until later that I thought of all the foul things I could have said to him. I wanted to cauterize him with words or worse. If I let you ram me like a dead pig carcass, if I yodeled on your dick until I choked, on a scale of one to ten, how worried about me would you still be? I wanted to place my iron of fury on him, watch his face go white as a scar.

Instead, I backed away as I politely smiled and shook my head. “I’ll be okay,” I said.

And I was. I was okay because I had something to live for. And contrary to whatever Patrick thought, I did have something to go home to. I had 172 episodes of my favorite show, all of them familiar, all of them filmed long ago and locked safely inside their little discs.

Here was my nightly routine: I would go home, shower, and fix something to eat. While the food was heating up I’d open the closet door and stare at the DVD boxes lined up neatly on their shelves. I liked how they asked nothing of me. They reminded me of nothing but themselves. I could stand there for an hour deciding which season, which episode, what mood I was in, and they would remain inert. They were quiet, contained. Dead cardboard and plastic and ink, patiently waiting for me to make the decision.

I first toured the mountain place in the first week of December; by the middle of the month I had signed the documents, Mr. Larwin began closing the deal, and the real estate agent was able to buy a new skirt and then some. I put my trailer up for sale and took to packing up my belongings. It took a single afternoon. I decided I would take my clothes, my recliner, my collection, a bowl, a cup, and a fork. Everything but the recliner fit into a duffel bag. Though leaving most things behind seemed wasteful, it also felt necessary; everything in the trailer felt tainted, irradiated by my past life and everyone who had witnessed it.

The news crews and unexpected visitors had dropped off by then. I decided to stay on at my job for another couple of weeks as I got everything wrapped up. I wanted to continue life as normally as possible until I moved to the next phase. I suppose, for someone else, it would have felt awkward dealing with coworkers who once considered you an equal but now treated you with distrust and resentment, but I found it more amusing than anything else. It was almost fun now, going to work, portraying myself. “Bonnie Lincoln.” Right after I won, my coworkers had been overly friendly, but once it was clear I was not sharing the wealth, how quickly their demeanors changed! No more hellos or smiles. Barely any acknowledgment at all. I didn’t blame them. I understood the instinctual contempt toward people with money—even now that I had money I still resented rich people, because I could not think of myself as rich, only as having more to lose. And winning my wealth by way of the lottery truly irked some people. I didn’t earn it, and worse, I didn’t deserve it. I was a not-young single woman in a decent job, no kids, no husband, no family to share my millions with, and I wasn’t even that great-looking—what sense did the world make? People didn’t like it.