Your story with Ed and Lex, a hurricane, tore through the wistful memories of your youth, leaving jagged ruins of what you once believed whole.

Back in school, the three of you were stitched together with a thread so fine yet seemed unbreakable, laughing in the golden dust of afternoons that smelled of cheap ambition, crammed into a peeling apartment on the edge of campus. But time, with its ruthless hand, scattered you across the moral spectrum. Lex became an FBI agent, while Ed slipped quietly into the dark, laundering money for the mafia. You, torn at the seams, straddling a fault line that runs deeper than the black and white.

You like to think of yourself as a shade of grey, living in its uneasy nuances. Tonight, that grey pulls you into a downtown club, where you've had a few too many. Before you know it, you've won far too many hands of blackjack. You can count cards, and tonight you've forgotten to pretend you can't.

A bouncer escorts you down the long, dim hallway as the music fades to silence. You curse your carelessness but think, not unkindly, that a lifetime ban from a clandestine card table might save you from yourself. Still, you brush your phone in your purse, Lex's name glowing just one button away.

The door at the end opens and there stands a familiar face you did not expect, Edward Amstel, your Ed.

"Thought there was a new card counter in town," he says, his voice lazy, almost bored. "But of course, it's you. I just bought the place. Like it?"

Before you speak, he plucks your phone from your purse. The glow of Lex's name hardens his face.

"He is your emergency contact? Pathetic," he hisses. "Why don't you let him put a collar on you? Wag your tail. Follow him like the obedient little dog you are."