She played the same machine on the boat every Friday, third from the end, because it had paid four hundred dollars in 2019 and she believed it remembered her. There was a routine: a knuckle rapped twice on the glass, the max-bet button pressed with her thumb and not her finger, and the word please, said out loud but quietly.

Over eleven years the machine took about nineteen thousand dollars from her and gave back roughly six, and she knew the numbers because she logged every session in a steno pad in the glovebox. The pad was not for taxes. It was evidence in a case she was quietly building about whether the machine loved her, and some Fridays it did.