I hate business trips. Always have. The airports, the hotels, the forced conversations with people I wouldn't normally spend five minutes with. My job requires me to travel four or five times a year, and every time I pack my bag, I feel a little piece of my soul detach and float away.

This particular trip was to Dallas. Three days of meetings with a client who changed his mind more often than I changed my socks. By the second afternoon, I'd had enough. I skipped the "networking dinner" they'd planned, told my boss I wasn't feeling well, and retreated to my hotel room.

The room was fine. Generic. A bed, a desk, a window that faced a parking garage. I ordered room service—a burger I didn't really want—and sat on the edge of the bed, scrolling through my phone, trying to find something that would make the evening feel less like a holding pattern.

I'd brought my laptop but I couldn't bring myself to open it. Too many emails. Too many follow-ups from the day's meetings. I needed something mindless. Something that didn't require explaining or justifying or pretending to care about quarterly projections.

I remembered I had an online casino account. One I'd opened months ago on a whim and barely used. I pulled it up on my phone, but the site was slow. Hotel Wi-Fi. Always terrible. The page kept timing out, the login screen flickering and dying before I could type my password.

I tried three times. Nothing.

I pulled up a search and looked for alternatives. Found a forum thread where someone mentioned using alternate addresses when the main site was blocked or slow. A few clicks later, I had a Vavada mirror link. It loaded instantly. Clean interface. No lag. Like the hotel Wi-Fi had suddenly decided to cooperate.

I logged in. My balance was forty-three dollars. Leftover from a session months ago. I'd forgotten it was there. A tiny digital relic from a night I barely remembered.

I deposited two hundred dollars. I told myself this was entertainment. The cost of the networking dinner I'd skipped. If I lost it, I'd spent less than I would have on drinks and mediocre appetizers. If I won something, maybe the trip wouldn't feel like a total loss.

I started on roulette. Not because I know anything about roulette. Because it was simple. A wheel, a ball, a few numbers. I bet small. Five dollars on red. Five on black. Five scattered around numbers that didn't mean anything. I wasn't trying to win. I was trying to disappear into the spin.

The first twenty spins were nothing. My balance hovered around a hundred and ninety. I was losing slowly, bleeding out in small increments. I didn't care. The rhythm was soothing. The spin, the bounce, the little ping when the ball landed. It drowned out the noise in my head.

Then I hit. A straight bet on seventeen. My dad's birthday. I hadn't even thought about it when I placed the bet. It just came out. Thirty-five to one. One hundred and seventy-five dollars appeared in my balance like a gift from someone who knew me.

I sat up. The burger was getting cold on the desk. The parking garage outside my window was dark now. I looked at the balance. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars. I was up a hundred and sixty-five. Not life-changing. But real.

I kept playing. Smaller bets now. More careful. I was protecting the win, trying to let it grow without risking too much. I played for another hour, grinding out small wins, avoiding big losses. My balance climbed to four hundred and twenty.

I switched to blackjack. Something I actually understood. I knew the odds, the strategy, the right times to double down and the right times to walk away. I played conservatively. Twenty-five dollars a hand. I won more than I lost. Small edges. Slow progress.

By the time I looked at the clock, it was almost midnight. I'd been playing for three hours. My balance was six hundred and ten dollars.

I stared at the number. Six hundred and ten dollars. On a ni