She was gambling. That's not a good word for what it was, but it's the closest one. High-stakes, underground, a private room above a vape shop that I'd driven past probably fifty times. The recorder caught maybe thirty minutes of what I now understand was poker, played at tables with envelope buy-ins, in a room full of men with voices that had the kind of calm that comes from not being scared of anything because they own the room. Riley lost that night. I could hear it. Twelve hundred dollars. She laughed at the end, the hollow laugh she has when she's about to cry, and said, "Next week I'll get it back." She would not get it back. Because when I added up every Tuesday for the last three months and a bit — twelve weeks, average seven hundred a night, some wins, mostly losses — the number in my head was somewhere around nine thousand dollars. Our savings account had dropped by eleven. I sat at our kitchen table at 1 AM on a Wednesday morning with that recording playing on loop, and I tried to figure out when exactly the woman I moved across the country for had turned into someone I didn't know.