Chapter 1
For five years, Sullivan Murray has been the luckiest man alive. This morning he went on camera and wished he'd never married me.
Which is a problem for him. Because I'm the luck.
My phone should have cracked on the tile. Anybody else's would have.
Instead it slid off the couch and landed face-up in the basket of laundry I hadn't folded. Screen lit, already playing.
That's how things go around me. A cab pulls over before I've lifted my hand. A coin comes up the way I need it.
Right now I'm thirty-one and worn thin, standing in a kitchen that isn't mine anymore, watching my husband on a stranger's phone.
One of those street clips. A guy stops people on the sidewalk with a mic and asks them one question.
This week: What would you tell yourself five years ago?
Sullivan had his arm around a girl. Young, lit up, looking at him like he was a warm room she'd just walked into.
I didn't have her name yet. It wouldn't take long.
"Babe. Say something good."
"I don't… okay. Uh." A little laugh, for her, not the camera. "I'd tell myself to find her sooner. Like, five years sooner. I wasted a lot of time getting to her."
The little hearts came up the screen by the thousands. Couple goals. This is real love. Bless them.
I kept waiting to feel it hit.
Six months back I'd have felt it in my teeth. I'd have called him forty times and screamed till I lost my voice and thrown something breakable and called the mess heartbreak.
He had a name for that woman. Madwoman.
Nothing hit. So I checked the date instead.
Five years ago this month, Sullivan married me.
Five years ago this month was the best hand a man was ever dealt, and there he stood on a sidewalk wishing he'd folded it for somebody else.
He wasn't born lucky. When I met him he had a bike and a basement with the damp coming up through the floor, and he kept his jaw shut so I wouldn't hear his teeth going.
I married him anyway, and everything he touched after that turned to gold.
His friends had a joke about it. They'd lift their glasses when I walked into a room.
"There's the clover. You didn't get rich, Murray. You got lucky the day you married her."
He believed it more than any of them. Kept my first ring, the cheap steel band from before there was any money, tucked behind the cards in his wallet.
The one time I caught him rubbing it, he went red.
"For luck," he said.
For one second the boy who bought me that steel ring was more real than the man on the screen, and I had to put a hand on the counter.
Then I let go.
So no, it didn't hurt to watch him wish the whole thing had started with someone else. It went colder than hurt. It set me very still, the way I go quiet at a table right before I stand up and leave the players to it.
He'd forgotten what year it was. He'd forgotten what he was wishing away.
He could keep the girl. He could keep the sidewalk and the four million strangers.
The luck was mine.
And I was done lending it out.
I set the phone down. The kitchen went quiet, and for once I wasn't the thing making it loud.
Then it buzzed. Dana, his assistant, the one who'd been mine first.
Weird thing today, she wrote. He lost a coin toss in a meeting and made everybody redo it. Twice. You know how he gets.
Sullivan didn't lose coin tosses. Not in five years.
He wasn't standing close to me anymore.
I turned the phone face-down.
Across town, without feeling it happen, the luckiest man alive had started to run out of luck. It would take him months to notice.
I intended to enjoy every one of them.