There is a reason there are no clocks in casinos, and that it is always hard to find your way back to the front entrance. There is a reason Vegas doesn’t have minibars in the hotel rooms, and there is a noticeable lack of windows anywhere near the gaming areas. Heck, there is a reason that the carpets in casinos are usually ugly and discordant; the idea is to keep your eyes up, on the flashing lights of the slots and the deft flight patterns of the dealing cards. The visual cues, the design of the building, the smell in the air—it’s all there to get you gambling and keep you gambling. Because the more you gamble, the more, on average, you lose. And it doesn’t matter if the casino is smack-dab in the middle of the Vegas strip, or here, three thousand miles away on the edge of Boston Harbor; a casino is one big act of deception, a reverse ATM masquerading as an entertainment facility, where everything and anything is aimed at separating you from your money.

Encore Boston Harbor was as pretty and twinkling as anything they’d ever cooked up in Nevada. From the $30 million Koons sculpture of Popeye—Popeye!—in the front hallway to that flowered merry-go-round in the lobby—complete with a unicorn, a Pegasus, and a hippocamp, because why not?—the place felt a lot like Vegas. And during the early evening hours, the clientele was well-heeled, professionals in sports coats mingling with club-attired millennials from the city. But the later it got, the more the patronage turned local, Chelsea and Everett and Malden, and that suited Hailey, because deep down, beneath her streaked blond hair, and the preppy-collared tennis shirt and matching skirt she was wearing, and her polished fingernails, and the fake jewelry on her fingers and throat, she was Chelsea and Everett and Malden. The clothes and the jewelry and even the hair were an act, something she’d carefully put together in the little bathroom she shared with two roommates in Central Square, Cambridge. Even the way she was sitting, bottle-tan legs crossed at the knee, tennis shoes bumping up and down, fingers absentmindedly curling twists of her golden hair—all of it was part of the act. Pretty blond trophy girlfriend, blowing through her boyfriend’s stacks of chips, not a care in the goddamn world.