Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn

      LYRICAL PRESS

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

      www.kensingtonbooks.com

      Copyright

      Lyrical Press books are published by

      Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

      Copyright © 2017 by Kate Clayborn

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      First Electronic Edition: October 2017

      eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0510-6

      eISBN-10: 1-5161-0510-9

      First Print Edition: October 2017

      eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0511-3

      eISBN-10: 1-5161-0511-7

      Printed in the United States of America

      Prologue

      They never could remember whose idea it had been, finally, to buy the ticket.

      This was frustrating for them all, not because any one of them wanted to have special claim on the ticket—whatever else they’d forgotten about the night, none of them ever questioned the fact that the ticket had been for all three of them, that they’d split the winnings on the off-chance they won. It was frustrating because it seemed so unlike all of them to even think of buying a lottery ticket.

      Kit wasn’t the type to quote you statistical unlikelihoods, but she was one of the most talented observational scientists around, and anyone with a shred of observational talent knew going in for a lottery ticket wasn’t altogether sensible. Plus, of the three of them, she was the most practical about money. She still lived in a shitty one-bedroom above One-Eyed Betty’s Bar and Restaurant, swearing that she wouldn’t buy a place of her own until she had a certain percentage of her student loans paid off and at least a twenty percent down payment for a house. No way could it have been Kit.

      Zoe was the most impulsive of their group; she sang karaoke and threw darts with whatever bearded hipster dude at the bar asked her and always ordered the special and also jetted off to exotic locales every year for vacation. But Zoe was also the most successful, and she didn’t need the money, and she wasn’t the kind of woman to want more of what she already had enough of. Zoe wouldn’t have thought to buy herself a ticket.

      And Greer thought the lottery was bad luck. She thought lots of things were bad luck, actually—the usual stuff, like black cats and walking under ladders and hats on the bed. But she had other ones too: goldfish, old brooms in new houses, opals, candles with two wicks. Mostly she accepted teasing about these superstitions, but Zoe and Kit both remembered clearly that Greer had once said lottery bad luck was real—she’d watched a whole show about it on TLC. Greer wouldn’t schedule a doctor’s appointment on the thirteenth of any month, so there was no way she’d buy a lottery ticket without some real coaxing.

      And yet—they’d bought a lottery ticket. There was even grainy surveillance video of their purchase, all three of them at the Seventh Street Quick Mart, looking like they’d had a bit too much to drink (they had—Betty ran a good happy hour), which was embarrassing, but maybe not quite as embarrassing as the fact that they were also purchasing twelve Snickers bars, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a box of tampons. One of the local news blogs had run a headline under a screenshot of the video: “Gal pals find best cure for PMS is a jackpot.” Zoe wanted to sue over that quip, and knowing Zoe, she would have done her hot-shot lawyer thing until the blog was wiped off the internet forever, but Kit—who was more concerned about keeping it quiet than any of them—had reminded her that it would just draw more attention to the whole thing.

      What they wanted, once they learned of their winnings—Gary from the Quick Mart called Betty, Betty called Kit, and Kit called Zoe and Greer—was to absorb the shock, to the collect their shares as privately as possible, and to make sense of their new lives.

      But that all came later.

      What came first was the three of them at Betty’s on a Wednesday night, where and when they’d met almost every week for the last four years. Seven total alcoholic beverages, two total plates of nachos, and three terrible days between them, and someone, at some point, brought up that night’s lottery.

      Maybe it was that others at the bar had been discussing it—last week’s jackpot had reached record proportions owing to a long stretch of no winners, but a group of twenty postal workers from the next state over had claimed the four hundred million, doing a press conference over the weekend all together, looking stunned and joyful and a little uncomfortable on camera. It was a big news story, and it seemed as if everyone was devoting at least a brief amount of dinner conversation to the life-changing implications of winning that kind of money.

      “Six of them said they’re going back to work,” said Greer, going straight for the newly deposited plate of nachos. “Can you imagine? You win four hundred million dollars and go back to delivering the mail.”

      “It’s really only around two-hundred-forty-eight million,” Zoe said. “Taxes.”

      “I’d go back to work,”