Chapter four

The space was small. That was the first rule I learned. It held about a hundred and fifty cases of noodles before it stopped accepting anything new, and it would not let me fill it beyond that no matter how I pushed.

The second rule was better. Whatever I placed inside stayed exactly as it was. A peach ripened on the seat of my car and I put it in the room, and three days later it was still perfectly firm, its skin still cool.

For two days I did nothing but test the bangle. A bag of rice. A bottle of milk. A frozen chicken. A box of matches. It swallowed them all and gave them back unchanged. By the end of the second day, I understood what my grandmother had left me. Not a fortune. Something far more useful.

A very small door, and a very long list.

I sat in the hotel room with a notepad and made myself do the math. Under two million dollars, until the hearing. A room that would hold a hundred and fifty cases, plus a storage unit for the overflow. Twenty-eight days.

It was not enough for everything I wanted. It was enough to begin.

So I began.

Every morning, I drove to a different wholesaler, so no one would notice how much I was buying. Every afternoon, I loaded what I could into the space and drove the rest to my storage unit. Rice, first, in fifty-pound sacks. Then oil, salt, sugar, canned beans, canned tuna. Then flour, then tea, then toilet paper by the hundreds of rolls.

On the fifth day, I visited a pharmacy and bought nine hundred dollars of antibiotics before the pharmacist began to look suspicious. On the sixth, I bought a crank radio, a set of solar chargers, and a dozen sturdy water filters. On the seventh, I bought seeds. Tomato, wheat, beans, squash, carrots, potatoes, every sack the garden center would sell me.

The clerk laughed. "Big garden, ma'am?"

"Very big," I said.

On a gray Sunday, I drove out to the cemetery where my grandmother was buried and knelt in the wet grass before her headstone.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "I gave away everything you left me. I didn't know he was like that. I should have listened when you looked at him so hard at the wedding."

The wind moved through the trees. A bird called somewhere, once.

"I don't know what this is," I said, and lifted my wrist so the jade caught the light. "I don't know how you knew. But I'm going to use it. I'm going to do something good with it. I promise."

The stone stayed silent. But the bangle turned warm on my skin, gentle and steady, and I stayed there a long time with my hand pressed over it.

By the eighth day, I had spent almost everything the court allowed me, and I was still far short of what I needed. That night I sat on the hotel carpet surrounded by receipts, and did what I had been trying not to do.

I called my cousin Cordelia.

Cordelia Rennick was a year older than me and had a very good marriage to a very rich man. At my grandmother's funeral, she had cried the loudest and hugged me the tightest. I did not expect her to say yes. But I needed to ask, and I needed to hear how she said no.

"A loan?" she said, in a voice like sugar. "Oh, honey. How much?"

"Two hundred thousand. Just until the court releases the trust."

"Oh, Odie." She sighed. "I saw the video. Terrible. Just terrible. But honestly, sweetheart, I've been hearing about the shopping. Vivienne says you've been buying crates of noodles?" She laughed, a little silver laugh. "Divorce does strange things to people. Maybe you should talk to someone. A professional."

"It's just a loan, Cordelia."

"Well, I can't lend money to someone who's, you know, not herself. My husband would have a fit."

I said thank you, and I hung up, and I looked at the phone for a while.

She posted about me that night. Not by name. Just a photograph of a grocery store aisle and a line: Some people cope with heartbreak by shopping. Pray for the ones who buy a lifetime of noodles. Four hundred people liked it. A hundred more commented. Some of them were relatives.

I did not cry. I picked up my notepad.

I had one more card to play, and I had been saving it.

In my last life, on the evening of March 14th, ten days after the date I had woken up, the Silverline National Lottery drew a jackpot of nearly three million dollars. I remembered because I had been sitting in the dark in Lorcan's kitchen that night, alone, watching the numbers on television. Six numbers. One winner.

I had always remembered them. I had always thought, dully, if only.

I wrote them on the back of a receipt, and I stared at them for a long time.

I bought a ticket on the twelfth. I bought a second one on the thirteenth, just in case. I told no one, not even Emrys. I only sat in my hotel room on the fourteenth with the television on and the sound low, and waited.

When the numbers rolled across the screen, I did not scream. I did not even stand up. I held the ticket in both hands and watched each number appear, one by one, exactly as I remembered, and I felt the whole world tilt on its axis.

Nearly three million dollars.

Mine.

It was not ten million. It was not even the money in the trust. But it was clean, and it was free, and nobody's lawyer could touch it. By the next Monday I had claimed it and turned it into a truck of frozen chicken, ninety pounds of dried beans, four hundred cases of canned fruit, and three portable generators.

Cordelia called that afternoon, breathless and sweet.

"Odie, honey! I heard a rumor that you came into some money! Oh, that's wonderful. Listen, I've been thinking about your loan—"

"Thank you, Cordelia," I said. "I found another way."

"But I really think—"

"I'm sure you do. Goodbye."

I hung up and stared at the truck, at the crates and crates of food being wheeled into my storage unit, and something warm and steady went through me. It was not triumph. It was not quite revenge.

It was the feeling of standing on ground that would hold.