“Yeah, but think about if we won, right,” he’d say, one of the many times when I’d had a go at him for wasting a pound. He was seventeen and had just lost another part-time job. “We could move away. Get a house somewhere. With a garden and that. It’d be worth it.”

“We? You’d share it with me, then?”

He scoffed. “You’re the only person I’d share it with.”

“Not even Jason?”

“I wouldn’t trust Jason with a tenner, Nic.”

Lottery tickets have dates on them. That’s kind of an important thing for them to have. There were tons of them, with dates going back to long, long before Dean had turned sixteen, scattered in the crevices of his bedroom.

That can get you in trouble. Both in ‘you don’t get the money you just won’ trouble, and in ‘this is literally illegal’ trouble.

Dean’s mum and dad and brother had made this extremely clear to him, when they found some of them. They told him he could keep his ticket, if he liked, and they’ll take all the older, more illegal ones to a certain Lottery authority who may be interested in them. Or he could just hand the winning ticket over to them and they’d forget they ever saw anything.

He’d stuffed the ticket down his pants and they weren’t letting him out of the flat until they got what they wanted. That’s Dean. He doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do.

That wasn’t before they managed to rip it in half, though.

It was ‘a fuck of an ordeal’, he told me on the journey here. He hasn’t told me a lot more than that.

In the Travelodge, I can’t help but wonder if they’ve found him.

And we don’t know if you can claim a win on a torn-up ticket.

The next message I’d got from him was at eleven thirty at night, after I’d settled down to sleep because I had college in the morning.

Pack a bag. We’re leaving.

I sat up in bed, trying not to make a sound. When?

Now.

In my head I tossed around all the possibilities of what was about to happen. We could leave but his parents might follow us. We could leave but the money might never come through, or maybe Dean would get arrested for shoplifting again and charged and go to prison and I’d be on my own and I couldn’t go back to college because I’d already missed too much. Maybe I could stay here and he would leave without me, but then maybe I’d never see him again.

But maybe, just maybe, we’d get the money and get a place together, and maybe that place would have a garden that I could plant trees and flowers in, and maybe we would be OK.

That was enough to get me up. The thought of the alternative, the daily grind of college with no Dean around at the end of the day, helped too.