At night I would sometimes lie in my bed and dream about living with Geannie and Jim, dream of them adopting me. It was a strange dream, I admit, for a twenty-something, thirty-something woman to have. But they had become so dear to me, and, most mysterious of all, they seemed to like me. For a time I even dressed like Geannie in an effort to understand her, or maybe I wanted to pay homage to her, or perhaps it was simply the result of being around her most days at the store; the motives of my earlier self are hard to pin down. I think I wished to be subsumed by her, by their whole life and way of living, in the way I’d always wished to be subsumed by a book. I wanted to disappear into a new, unexpected version of myself.

My own identity had always seemed suspect to me. Though I believed a shadowy, hidden kernel of personal essence lay within the heart of every individual—a certain absolute truth that determines one’s identity—I had never found mine. I felt I could change in an instant depending on the situation or the people around me. It all seemed so real in the moment, and so completely fake upon reflection. Recalling my own memories felt like remembering a stranger’s dreams. I had no true idea of myself. Life with Geannie and Jim offered a way out completely, an off-ramp into another story altogether. I could start over. The witnesses would be different. And isn’t that what decides a life? The witnesses? Whatever I really was, the promise of this other self always beckoned.

There seemed to be a background noise to life, I had always noticed, a frequency that hummed continuously and held a certain color and mood. It changed with each season of the year though it was beyond weather, beyond any change of light. It was felt in my bones, the waves creating a wall of safety, of certainty. Geannie and Jim kept the frequency going. Oh, I would do other things and see other people—Krystal and I went clubbing in town once, disastrously, and a few times we went to parties at her friends’ or coworkers’ houses, which ended in puke or blackout or both, and sometimes we explored abandoned houses together, wandering bored through the rot, or sometimes I took walks and went to the library, and I read books, and I consumed movies and food, and I paid bills, and once I went to the DMV to get something sorted out with my truck—but the background hum, the thing that reassured me that the world was real and solid, seemed to be always traceable to the Scheeles, their presence, their unspoken support, the surety that they would always be there.

When Geannie and Jim left, the background noise stopped. The silence felt like a warning. Of what, though, I had no idea.

My first phone call after winning the lottery was to Elmo Larwin, who ran a legal empire named Larwin, Morris & Hawkes. Their claims to fame were estate planning and financial affairs, and their offices took up an entire floor of a flashy, ten-story office building in the city’s downtown district.