None of it was real. The money on the table was basically everything she had to her name. There was no boyfriend, she’d never held a tennis racket in her life, and her hair was naturally brown. A magic act within a magic act. Anybody looking her way—from the pit boss to the men in the security booths attached to the “eyes in the sky” monitor above the blackjack felt to the little old lady at the end of the table—would see what she wanted them to see: pretty blonde trophy girlfriend. Not an applied math PhD student at MIT who was paying her way through life with the one attribute that was real about her: her facility with numbers. And right now, the numbers were telling her that she was about to walk away from a long night of cards with enough money to pay her rent, a semester of tuition, and most of her outstanding bills.

The old man finally asked for another card on top of the hard fourteen he had in front of him, which the dealer wearily obliged, revealing a four. Hailey added one to the running count, adjusting the true count in her head: Plus fourteen, two-thirds into the deck, a really deep deal, probably because the dealer, mid-fifties, balding, with glasses fogged by hours in the over-air-conditioned room, looked bored out of his mind and at the end of a long shift. A count that high so deep into the deck meant the cards left to deal were heavy with faces and aces; the dealer’s showing six would likely lead to a busted hand, which meant the four hands in front of Hailey would pay out.

Even if it sounded complicated to the uninitiated, beating the game of blackjack was actually simple math. You kept track of the low cards and the high cards as they came out of the deck; the more low cards that came out, the higher your count, and the better the deck became. The deeper into the deck you went, the more significant that number was—the difference between the running count and the true count. And the higher that number went, the more money you wanted to have on the table.

Hailey’s original bet had been two thousand dollars, and she’d been dealt two face cards. The dealer had turned over a six. She’d split the faces, which was an unusual play. At the level she was playing, you’d expect a move like that to get attention from the pit boss, but the cocktail waitress was way more interesting than a dumb, drunk blonde throwing her boyfriend’s money away after a day on the tennis court. Then both of Hailey’s split hands had hit faces—a jack and a queen—and she’d split again.