50 Billion Reasons to Leave You novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One Hand

Kathleen plays the single hand, wins the Rask marker and walks out at dawn, then a text calls her to the hospital.

The dealer explained the game in four sentences.

Five cards each, one draw, one round of betting, highest hand takes the table.

He would put the marker on the felt as his stake.

I had to put up myself.

"If you lose," he said, "you stay with the house until the debt is paid."

"And if the debt is never paid?"

"Then you stay."

The men at the other tables had stopped pretending to play.

I looked at the five cards in front of me.

A pair of fours, a nine, a jack and a three.

It was nothing, and he knew it was nothing, because I had been gripping them too tightly.

I put my hands flat on the felt instead.

I work nights in a county emergency room.

People lie to me about how much they drank and where it hurts, and the only parts of them that never lie are their hands.

So I watched the dealer's hands.

He took two cards off his own hand and drew two more.

His left thumb went to the edge of the table and pressed down hard.

It was a small movement, the kind a man makes when he has been told to hold still.

I drew three cards and didn't look at them.

I looked at him.

"Your bet," he said.

"All of it."

"All of what, Mrs. Rask?"

"The marker against me," I said. "Match it or fold."

The room was so quiet I could hear the lift cable hum somewhere above us.

The dealer looked at his cards.

Then he looked at the glass wall, only for a moment.

The old man behind it did not move.

The dealer laid his cards face down and slid them toward the center of the table.

"The house folds," he said.

He turned his hand over anyway.

Two kings and a pair of sevens.

He had beaten me by a mile.

I turned over my own cards.

Four, four, nine, two and a queen.

I didn't have a hand, and everyone in the room had just watched me win it.

I should have asked why he folded.

I was shaking too hard to ask.

The dealer picked up the black card and held it out to me with both hands.

"The marker is yours, Mrs. Rask. The house recognizes it."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you can walk out of here. And it means Lowell Rask now owes his fifty billion dollars to you."

I took the card.

It was heavier than it looked, and black on both sides, with a gold line of print along the edge.

Nobody stopped me when I stood.

A man in a gray jacket brought my coat and my bag from the ballroom and set them on the chair.

My phone was in the bag, still at fourteen percent.

"The lift is on your left," the dealer said. "Collect when you are ready, Mrs. Rask. The house will wait."

I looked at the glass wall one last time.

The old man behind it was standing with one hand pressed flat on the glass.

He was looking at me, and his face was wet.

I didn't know him, so I looked away first.

The lift let me out on a loading dock behind the old rail hotel.

It was almost dawn.

The lake wind came down the alley and went straight through my gown.

I stood there in a dress Odette had chosen and shoes that Summer had said would be perfect.

For seven years I had been a Rask who did what she was told.

I put the marker inside my bra, because the gown had no pockets, and turned on my phone.

It was full of messages from people who had not called me once while I was down there.

Five from Odette, all of them about the photographers.

Three from Summer.

The last one was from Lowell, sent at 5:52.

"Donovan collapsed at the hotel. St. Anselm's, private wing. Come now and don't make a scene."

Under it, one more line from Summer.

"Kate, please hurry. He's asking for you."

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