I was a fair player, but I learned quickly that poker loves no man and good luck can turn to bad with no warning. Further, I detested losing. So I began looking for a way to tilt the odds in my favor. One obvious way was to cheat, which I wasn’t opposed to, but that style of play has a limited shelf life, as does your career once you get caught. Then one night I was invited to a game where I discovered what I soon dubbed the “silver spooners.” Trust fund kids who looked at poker as entertainment. They didn’t really care if they won or lost. They liked the reputation and action either way. Given their reckless behavior, I seized the opportunity and provided a service. By the end of my sophomore year, I had money in the bank and was making a name for myself.

As a player, I had two abilities that set me apart from most everyone else: First, risk didn’t bother me and never had. I valued nothing, including money, so losing it didn’t ding me like it did others. Second, I could read body language. Like Braille. Neither trait can be coached. You’re either born with them or you’re not. The higher stakes games were invite only and run by the son of a Silicon Valley tycoon. One night I cleaned up and ran the table. Took everyone’s money. And it was a good night. Several thousand. One of my sore loser competitors suggested I cheated and manufactured evidence to support his claim. The invites quickly stopped. As a rising junior with few options, I was in a bit of a bind until he—a fifth-year senior—started running his mouth, so I challenged him to a public winner-take-all. Given his trust fund, he’d spent considerable time in both Vegas and Atlantic City trying to make others think he knew what he was doing. He liked to tell people he was a “professional cardplayer,” but I had my doubts. Nobody as good as he said he was ran his mouth that much. Or if they did, they didn’t run it very long. Sooner or later, poker humbles every man. His would be sooner.

Winning at poker is easy provided you know which hands to bet on and which hands not. Simple, right? Wrong. Wanting to rattle his saber and set me on my heels, he went all in on the third hand, but his bluff was ill-timed. I matched him, doubled up, and called. When the dealer laid down the river and he realized that a full house always beats three of a kind, the color drained out of his face. The pot sat at $17,000. Half of it was his. The girl propped beneath his arm all of a sudden found an excuse to visit the ladies’ room. As his “friends” pulled away, not wanting to be associated with a loser, I saw the look in his eye and—so help me—I almost told him not to do it. But again, if he was going to be stupid enough…

He smiled around the room, trying to save face. “Double or nothing.”

I scraped the money across the table. “What have you got?”

He dropped the keys to his Audi on the table. The “oohs” and “aahs” rose around the table. His friends patted him on the back, and his girl returned from her potty break to slide in alongside him. I didn’t own a car and the thought of having one appealed to me. I nodded to the dealer, who dealt the cards, and the cards were not kind to him.

I walked out with not only his $8,500, but also the keys to his car and the beginnings of a storied reputation. Given that the car was his father’s, his father quietly called the following day and offered me a check for the value, which I accepted. Sixty-four thousand dollars. A good night. Then and now, it wasn’t about the money. It was about being told I couldn’t do what I wanted.

Word spread and I got invites from all over to play. Problem was, I was getting invited by guys who’d done what I’d done—preyed on somebody with money. I could hear it in their voices and read it across their bodies. I played a few games and won a good bit, but they were marinating me. Slow roasting to tenderize and fillet me so they could take my last penny. I knew they were working me into a lather, waiting for their moment to pounce, but I never gave them the satisfaction. To their abject surprise, on a high-stakes Thursday night, I ran the table, cleaned up, and made enough to live on for a year. Collecting my chips, I kept my mouth shut but when I glanced at their eyes, I knew two things: that I’d stung them and that it would never happen again. Babysitting hour was over. Next week would start the reckoning. Having read the writing on the wall, I did what they never suspected. To everyone’s disbelief, just when it was starting to get good and I was beginning to make a name for myself, I cashed in and walked away.

This did not make them happy, and as they had some pull in the city, they blackballed me in every game in and around not only Boston, but the Northeast. It didn’t matter. I’d tired of poker and I’d tired of Boston. My eyes had hit the horizon, and I was looking for a new game. And I found one.

In London.

Chapter Three

The water was waist-deep, gin-clear, and given no breeze, a sheet of glass. Deeper out, it faded from turquoise to midnight blue. Off to my right, the sun was falling en route to a beautiful setting. Twenty feet away, a lobster scurried to an underwater hide. A ray hovered just inches off the ocean floor. Two hundred meters out, a couple of boats were anchored. Kids in the water. Snorkels. Masks. Lobster bags. Laughter. Floating in circles around them, oil-soaked adults lay baking on rafts. The smell of salt, coconut oil, rum, and spent fuel suggested they’d been there the better part of the day.

Most every weekend, folks out of Miami motored out of Biscayne Bay, through Stiltsville, and across the forty-four miles between us, appearing early and packing this place with dozens of boats. At just over three miles long and a quarter mile wide—​little more than a white speck in the Atlantic—the Bahamian island of Bimini is a blue marlin and bonefish hot spot, an offshore oasis for the Miami jet set, a famed Hemingway hangout, and one of the last vestiges of Her Majesty’s empire. It’s also a convenient escape for the disillusioned and a pretty good place for a rather successful drug runner to live uninhibited. The beach behind me sat bleach white and relatively untouched. The sand lay dotted with hundreds of conch shells. The northern tip of the island, including this beach, had been privately owned for a couple generations, but it sold last year to a casino, which was rapidly carving the landscape. In its wake, quaint fishing village had given way to the worst a casino has to offer. Local legend held that the lost city of Atlantis sat out in front of me just beyond the anchored boats. The legend held merit given the inexplicable geometric rock formations just below the water’s surface. I guess you don’t need me to tell you the name of the casino. The entrepreneurial owners had already cashed in on the legend and were ferrying visitors out to the rocks in glass-bottom boats. Not surprisingly, the legend had grown considerably. Mermaids had been sighted.

I landed on this island much like Columbus. By mistake. Been here a decade. Jimmy Buffett said it best: “Summers and winters scattered like splinters…”

Still no sight of her on the beach. My left foot was tapping on its own. She’d be here any minute. Right? Right. The magistrate had first balked when I asked him to marry us on the beach at 7:00 p.m., but then I laid a wad of cash on the table and his entire countenance changed. Started talking about how he loved marrying folks on the beach at sunset. Still no sign of him, either, but he had a few moments to go yet.

In the moments following my not-so-romantic proposal, I’d asked Shelly where she’d like to get married. She pointed at her feet. “Right here.” Which explained my present location. She wanted the setting sun on her face. Breeze in her hair. My hand in hers. She believed that our marrying here, in this turquoise water, would wash off the memory and pain of her first. I’d never been married, but that does not suggest I didn’t have memory and pain. I stood there, ankle-deep, envisioning her, the wind tugging her hair across her eyes, her cheeks. Draping her cover-up across her bathing suit. Bare feet. Tanned. That smile. Wading out to meet me. Taking my hand.