Chapter 6: Black Card

The hotel bed was so soft that I woke up at four in the morning sure that I had died.

I lay there in the dark, looking at a ceiling I had not paid anyone's rent to sleep under.

At nine, I put on yesterday's clothes and went to the mall.

The lawyer's courier had left an envelope at the front desk with ten thousand dollars in cash and a black card in the trust's name.

I didn't plan to use the card.

I planned to buy a pair of socks without holes.

Then I walked past the window of a department store and saw a gray wool coat on a mannequin.

It had a deep collar and a belt, and it was the color of Lana's eyes.

I went in.

The saleswoman was young and kind, and she did not look at my boots.

"It's eighteen hundred dollars," she said, in the voice of someone who expects you to leave.

"I'll take it. And a suit. Whatever you think fits me."

She walked me to the fitting rooms.

I came out in a navy suit that made me look like a man who had never loaded a truck.

I stared at myself in the mirror.

My shoulders looked wider.

My face looked, for the first time I could remember, like it belonged to a person who slept.

"Wow," the saleswoman said.

I was still looking at myself when I heard the screech.

"That is him! That's my son!"

I turned.

My mother came across the carpet in her camel coat, with Shelby a step behind her holding her phone like a weapon.

Shelby wore sunglasses indoors.

"Tanner Briggs! What did you steal?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Won $1 Billion and Ditched the Deadbeats from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.