The same night, Lance found himself unable to sleep after the excitement of the day. He glanced at the laptop, which was still plugged in, and thought about every hand that he played. After a while, he gave up trying to sleep and pulled out an old Power Rangers lunchbox from under his bed.
He then sat cross-legged on his bed and opened up the lunchbox, feeling as if he were opening a time capsule.
Inside were scraps of creased notepaper with numbers scribbled in the margins – childish handwriting slowly becoming more adult, as if his growing up was documented not in journals but in calculations.
He leafed through them slowly. From small debts that he owed his friends, to the ones they paid to Mr. T over the years…
"Took me my entire childhood and Mum's youth to pay off everything… and one night of poker to match it."
He didn't feel pride, though. If anything, it was a dull ache as he thought, Why couldn't it have been this easy then? Why did we have to suffer so long?
Lance was about to close the lunchbox when something caught his eye – an old photo. It was creased so many times the corners had worn away, and the color had faded to near sepia. But the image was clear enough: a baby, around 1 year old, biting a gold bracelet, in the arms of a man. Next to them was a woman with a bright smile. They were standing behind a table where stacks of poker chips were on.
"Mum…" Lance smiled as he looked at the younger version of his mother. He then looked at the man holding him – well, part of the man.
Lance's chest tightened – the upper part of the photo had been torn clean off. No head. No face. Just a missing presence.
"I forgot I even had this…" Lance whispered. His fingers brushed the jagged tear running through the man's shoulders. Even without the face, even without the memory – the way the man's hand cradled the baby, the lean of his body towards the woman smiling beside him… It was his father.
And Lance had torn him out.
He couldn't remember when exactly. He just remembered the feeling. Rage. Confusion. Maybe the power had been cut that day. Maybe Mr. T or Scar visited. All he could recall was that he tore the photo out of anger and hoped that if the man were completely gone from his life, so would the debt.
"Mum had completely erased him from our life…" Lance sighed. He was just about to tuck the photo back inside when something caught his eye. He leaned in. Frowned. Then quickly moved to his desk, clicked on the lamp, and held the photo under the light.
There. In the background. Blurry but visible.
World Series…
The rest of the words were obscured by the figures in the foreground.
Lance froze.
Kenji had mentioned it before—the World Series of Poker. The pinnacle. The stage where legends were made, where winners took home gold bracelets.
"He made it to the World Series… and won?"
Lance barely knew his father, and his mother barely talked about him. All she said to him was that he disappeared after racking up lots of gambling debts. All his life, he thought his father was just a bad gambler, but this photo seemed to suggest something else.
"He's a competitive poker player…"
Lance opened his laptop and fired up Chrome, fingers poised over the keyboard.
And then he stopped.
He didn't know his father's full name.
He let out a dry chuckle. "I don't even know the name of my own father… How pathetic."
He could've picked up the phone and called his mother—but it might trigger memories best left buried. With her health lately, that wasn't a risk he was willing to take.
"He might know…"
Lance made a mental note to ask the man about it one day.
But for now, he still had more games to play.
######
Team Gambit continued to meet up once a week, trying their best to make it to the ITM stage as much as possible.
Some nights were brutal—no cashes, no luck, just defeat and tilted moods. But other nights? They struck gold.
After two months, they'd banked just over $50,000 in winnings. Real, hard-earned money.
The stack of bills sitting on Kenji's kitchen table looked surreal. Lance stared at it like it might vanish if he blinked too fast.
"I've never seen this much money in one place before…" he murmured.
Kenji and Mila exchanged glances and merely smiled at each other knowingly. They'd watched their father settle entire business disputes with more money than this, handed over in briefcases.
But they also understood that they came from privileged backgrounds. For Lance—and for Amara—this wasn't just a stack of money. It was proof. Of effort. Of struggle. Of how far they'd come.
Amara picked up a wad of bills and flipped through it, sighing. "We could've done a lot with this if not for someone's genius mistake…" She shot Kenji a pointed look. "Lance, are you really going to meet his debtors today?"
Lance nodded. "The sooner we pay off what we can, the better. Even if they said no interest for six months… I don't like sleeping with that hanging over our heads. Also, I'm not too keen on bringing $300,000 in cash over to dodgy places."
They then quickly put the cash into Lance's old black backpack; the seams quickly strained under the bulk of cash.
"It's not all of it, but paying this portion off should buy us some peace," Lance said after they tucked the last of neatly stacked bills in.
Kenji leaned back against the counter, sipping a can of soda like this was any normal Saturday morning. "Peace sounds great. I'm all for peace. Peace is good. You know what's not good? Getting kneecapped in an alley."
"Be careful…" Mila said softly, her brows drawn tight with worry.
Lance nodded and reached over to gently pat her head. "Don't worry. I'll be fine."
Mila swatted his hand away, cheeks tinged pink. "I'm not a kid, you know."
"I know," Lance replied with a small grin. "But sometimes, I wish you were. Life was easier when our biggest concern was whether the cafeteria was serving fish fingers."