(Oh, bother! It looks as though I might have managed to post this while it was still in draft stage and needed tidying up. My apologies to anyone who read the slightly mangled version. This one will, I hope, be at least marginally better.)

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty: You Win Some, You Lose Some

EDITED AGAIN because I forgot the content warning: Physical violence with fights. Gambling. Casual racism.

The four of them pack and fly out to Vegas with Abby hardly saying a word the whole way. America checks them into the hotel ‘flashing her fake ID, as if she had done it a thousand times before’, which makes Travis realise she’d probably done precisely that and this is probably where they got the fake IDs in the first place. Which raises several questions:

• The implication here is that Mick arranged the fake IDs so that Abby could win him money. Why on earth was he also paying for a fake ID for America, and why on earth were her family allowing some sleazeball to take their underage daughter off to casinos on a regular basis?
• According to this post by Das Sporking, Vegas casinos are really strict about not letting underage people gamble, and they’re careful about checking IDs, especially if paying out on any big win. So… are we meant to believe that Mick was regularly taking his very young teenage daughter to these casinos without anyone ever at any point thinking ‘hang on, that girl looks like she might be underage; better be extra careful about checking that ID?’
• Also, wait a minute… a couple of chapters back, one of Travis’s family mentioned that Mick gave interviews to ‘all the papers’ (implying national papers, if Travis’s family read them in another state) about his luck changing at midnight on Abby’s thirteenth birthday. So Mick made it clear in national papers that he was taking a child as young as twelve to gamble regularly (and at least once stay up past midnight doing so, during term time), and no-one from the casinos he attended regularly noticed? (Or CPS, for that matter?)
• Now that I think about it, why on earth did multiple national papers care enough about the gambling woes of some metaphoric as well as literal loser that they were running articles about it?
• As much as I love Das Sporking, could they make it any more difficult to find things in their archives?

Anyway, Travis checks in with Abby as to how she’s feeling and she just says she doesn’t want to be here. They go up to what turn out to be two separate rooms (one for each couple) in a very posh-sounding hotel, so, for a trip that’s meant to make money, they seem to be spending quite a bit of it up front. Travis is trying to be supportive to Abby (and for once he really does seem to be trying), but she doesn’t want to know, and doesn’t want him along when she goes to start gambling.

“If I’m going to win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend, I have to concentrate. I don’t like who I’m going to be while I’m at those tables, and I don’t want you to see it, OK?”

I can’t get past this whole ‘win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend’ plan. I mean, I know that if you’re good enough at poker it’s possible to make enough profit overall that you can make a passable living from it long term, and I know that occasionally you can get lucky enough to have a huge win. But, however good you are, you can’t expect to make $7000/day, because a significant part of it is always going to depend on literal luck of the draw.

Anyway, Travis actually respects what Abby says and backs off, which is almost as unlikely as winning $14,000 in a weekend. Yay, Travis! He and Shep go to check out the Strip while Abby plays. They see the Fountains of Bellagio, though Trav doesn’t know what they’re called (this has nothing to do with anything; I just think the Fountains of Bellagio are awesome and wanted to have an ‘I remember those!’ moment) and some other stuff and head back to the casino, where Trav sees Abby at one of the tables but still stays out of her way.

Before I can start liking the new and improved Travis too much, however, he sees a man holding her arm and is on the brink of charging over there with violence in mind before Shepley grabs him and points out that it’s one of the casino workers and if Travis goes off on one he’ll just get them all kicked out. Travis gets closer and hears the man tell Abby that it was good to see her again and that he’d see her tomorrow at five. It turns out that this is Abby’s former boyfriend; the one who wanted to be a youth minister, who is apparently now working at a Vegas casino instead. It seems Jesse (the former boyfriend) knows Abby is underage and is arranging to meet her tomorrow in return for letting her play till midnight without telling anyone.

Travis isn’t happy about this and Shep spells out to him that she can’t just go to another casino because they’d spot she’s underage and… apparently people here know her and let her get away with underage gambling? Despite it being highly illegal? Anyway, this brief conversation apparently takes up all the rest of the time until midnight, since next thing Trav and Shep are meeting the girls at their table.

So, it’s midnight, Jesse won’t let Abby play for any longer, and she still hasn’t won enough. Trav and Shepley offer her their winnings as well; apparently, in what was supposedly half an hour of playing blackjack to pass the time, the boys won $900 between them. Abby says that even with the money from the boys she’s still $5000 short, which would mean that in the few hours since she got here she’s won $8100 plus whatever four flights to Vegas and two rooms in a swish hotel cost. So, having made dangerous levels of alcohol abuse sound fun and sexy in this book aimed at people in their teens and twenties, McGuire is now making gambling sound like an easy way of earning money. Any other great messages you want to pass on to today’s youth, McGuire? Drug abuse is an exciting pastime, maybe?

Anyway, comes up and tells her he can’t give her any more time. Then he drops kisses on her hair and the corner of her mouth before leaving, so looks like he’s not planning for tomorrow’s dinner to be just an ‘old friends catching up’. Shep physically holds Travis back from attacking Jesse. Abby protests to Trav that she had to agree to have dinner with Jesse because the guy to whom her father owes money is Mob and is going to have her father killed if he can’t come up with the money:

‘Have you ever dealt with the Mob, Travis? I’m sorry if your feelings are hurt, but a free meal with an old friend isn’t a high price to pay to keep Mick alive.’

I’m open to correction on this one by any of the very many people who know more about the Mob than me, but would they actually kill someone for not paying off a debt on time? I would have thought it would be more along the lines of breaking some important bones and telling you you now had X further days to come up with the money before they came back to break more. Lather, rinse, repeat for as long as they think there’s any chance whatsoever of you coming up with any of the payment, which a dead debtor can’t do. Am I wrong?

Oh, well. It is fair to say that Abby would probably not be hugely comforted by the thought that her father is only in line for significant injury rather than actual death.  And I also realise that, while she would be entirely within her rights at this point to tell Mick to eff off and deal with the consequences of his own actions, that’s somewhat emotionally difficult when said consequences will involve maiming. So, yes, I can see how she actually would feel obliged to go along with Jesse’s demand for an evening out in order to keep him quiet.  I was going to say that nothing was stopping her from telling Jesse not to kiss her and/or introducing Travis as her boyfriend to make the situation clear, and then realised that actually she does still need to stay on Jesse’s good side at least until she’s collected her winnings and got out of there, since he could still blow her cover on being underage. So, since we seem to be ignoring the fact that this is all too illegal for the casino to pay out anyway, I suppose this bit of plot makes some sense.

America tells them they’ve got to get to Benny’s, and they head over there. I guess McGuire either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you don’t get automatically handed the money as you win it; instead, you win piles of chips which you then have to cash in (with, once again, your ID getting carefully scrutinised to check for anyone who’s underage). I’m mildly amused by the image of them handing this mobster a pile of casino chips. Anyway, they walk to Benny’s house, which is nearby. The door is opened by a huge intimidating doorman. Apparently part of the intimidating aspect is his skin colour:

He was enormous – black, intimidating, and as wide as he was tall

Because apparently ‘black’ goes with ‘intimidating’ in McGuire’s mind.

Benny is also there, standing next to the doorman. Psychologically speaking, this seems like an odd choice; I would have thought his expected approach would have been to have the doorman keep them waiting with the tension building up before ushering them into the inner sanctum. Practically speaking, I can’t see how he’s supposed to be standing next to someone that huge without having to peek out from behind the doorjamb.

Anyway, Benny tells the others they need to wait outside and Travis insists he’s coming in, which Benny seems to respect. Trav makes sure he keeps himself between her and the doorman because he sees the doorman as ‘the biggest threat’. He’s not going to attack Abby randomly, Travis, and Benny’s not going to arrange any attacks at least until he gets his money.

Abby begs Benny to take the amount she’s got and give her tomorrow to get the rest. Benny correctly picks up on the fact that she’s doing this because she doesn’t think she can get the rest. They’d have done better to say ‘Here, take this now so that we’re not carrying $20,000 around Vegas at risk of any muggers’, which would have sounded more believable. Benny decides he’s going to arrange for his goons to attack Abby:

“I’m considering teaching Mick a lesson, and I’m curious just how lucky you are, kiddo.”

Travis has something to say about that:

“I hope you know, Benny, that when I take out your men, I mean no disrespect. But I’m in love with this girl, and I can’t let you hurt her.”

Nice. Gotta say, I like playing-it-cool Travis a whole lot better than gratuitously-violent Travis. Benny, by this point, is finding the whole thing amusing. He tells Travis what to expect fight-wise from each of his goons (one’s got a knife, the other’s never lost a fistfight). The goons attack, and, of course, Travis takes out both of them because he is Just That Good and apparently fighting his brothers as a child fully qualifies him to take out a best-of-the-best Mafia fighter.

Benny promptly sees an opportunity for a deal; if Travis takes Goon 2’s place in the fight he was meant to have the next day, which he’s now in no shape for, Benny will forgive Abby’s father the rest of the debt. Travis is totally up for this. They go out, meet Shep and America, and go back to the hotel where Travis showers off the blood and they get the other two caught up on events. America points out the obvious:

“This is ridiculous! Why are we helping Mick, Abby? He threw you to the wolves! I’m going to kill him!”

But Travis still wants to go ahead with the fight, having found that the one he’s just had was a superb outlet for his anger. He is, apparently, going to be fighting someone called Brock McMann, of whom both he and Shepley have heard:

“No way. No fucking way, Trav. The guy’s a maniac!”

Travis is fine with the plan as he’s doing it for Abby. Abby doesn’t want him to, but Trav retorts that he doesn’t want her going to dinner with her ex-boyfriend, so

“[…] I guess we both have to do something unpleasant to save your good-for-nothing father.”

And we’re at the end of another chapter. Nice to have some plot moving along finally, even if it did contain some pretty massive holes.

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Nineteen: Daddy’s Home

Well, that sounds ominous.

Friday, the day of the date party, three days after Abby smiled about the new couch and then minutes later turned to whiskey over my tats.

That sentence took me a minute to decipher. As far as I can make out, it’s McGuire’s attempt to skip through some stuff from ‘Beautiful Disaster’ without having to go to the trouble of writing the scene, and either it hasn’t occurred to her that some of her readers won’t have read ‘Beautiful’ or she just didn’t care. The last chapter of ‘Walking Disaster’ did mention Travis buying a new couch (I forgot about his habit of having his five-minute stands on the old one and thus missed the fact that this was meant to be a New Start for the New Travis and skipped it), but I have no idea whether ‘turned to whiskey’ is meant to be some bizarre version of ‘turned to mush’ or whether it’s that she turned to drink over the stress of having Travis swear undying love to her in a gushy tattoo. Look, McGuire, if you want to write a different-POV version, write it; don’t just skip chunks when you get bored.

(five minutes later…)

Oooookaaaaay, just checked out the corresponding bit in ‘Beautiful Disaster’…

(several days later)

and have thus given myself a lot of extra stuff to type. Since the best answer to ‘Where do I start?’ seemed to be ‘By leaving this hot mess for another day; indeed, for many other days’, I went to bed.

Working through this:

1. Somewhat to my surprise, since it involves someone actually having an appropriate response, my latter explanation was correct and Abby did in fact turn to whiskey over the stress of Travis’s lovey-dovey tattoos. Not only does she recognise this is a bad idea when they’re so early in their relationship, she’s also worried over the fact he did this right after finding out who her father was and thus might be more interested in Mick Abernathy’s daughter than in Abby. Good for you, Abby!

2. Travis, unfortunately, is determined to brush Abby’s concerns aside. He also tries telling her that he was just passing by the tattoo place and decided to go in and get it done, which we flat-out know is a lie since we know from his conversation with Shepley last chapter that he planned this in advance.

3. For those curious about what the tats actually were; he got ‘Pigeon’ tattooed on his wrist (you know, the nickname he invented for Abby that she hated, so now she’s stuck with looking at it every time she sees his wrist), and ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’, (a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible) tattooed along his ribs in Hebrew. The latter is the tattoo that he referred to in the last chapter of ‘Walking’ as ‘What I always said I would do if I met the right girl’. Uh, nice attempt at a retcon, McGuire, but I haven’t actually forgotten that back in Chapter Three he was insisting he wasn’t ever going to get that hung up on anyone, not to mention all that vile misogyny in the early chapters; I’m not buying this retcon of Trav as always having secretly been a romantic at heart. The romance in this gesture is, of course, also rather thoroughly negated by his determination to disregard Abby’s wishes or feelings in the matter, so, alas, I cannot get any warm mushy feels from it.

But alsooooo….

4. In the process of looking this up, I found that McGuire had once again left an entire chunk out of the story when writing up ‘Walking’. This involved Abby challenging Parker over the fact that he’d been trying to shit-stir between her & Travis with the openly declared intention of getting her to come back to him. Parker isn’t even embarrassed about that and just makes a slut-shamey joke about Abby clearly not being so shiny and new any more.

5. Oh, yes, and Abby and Trav are busy being the get-a-room couple in lectures, and after the showdown with Parker skip a lecture to screw in an empty lecture hall, and As Foretold By The Troutian Prophecy this is treated as all just so cuuuute and romantic.

Great. I started hoping I could get through this more quickly, and it’s taken me forever to get past the first sentence. Though I suppose that’s only because McGuire left so much stuff out, so if she’d put it all in then I’d probably have taken even longer over it, so small mercies.

Aaaaanyway, where the hell were we…

The girls were gone doing what girls do on the day of date parties

Because they’re girly girl girls whose actions all fall into the same category, obviously, because they’re giiiirrrrrrls. Travis, meanwhile, is really nervous about something and doesn’t know what, so he’s had a couple of drinks because apparently he hasn’t learned anything about maladaptive coping skills. (To be fair, he is a nineteen-year-old student so this bit’s realistic.) He’s also waiting on the steps in front of the apartment for Toto to do his business, so nice to know McGuire’s remembered Toto again. Toto produces, and Trav picks him up and goes back inside, so I guess scooping up the dog muck that has just been left right outside a (I assume) shared apartment building is not a thing Travis does. Lovely.

Travis spells out for us that he’s still anxious Without Apparent Cause:

The date party would be my first, yes, and I was going with my girlfriend for the first time, but the knot in my stomach was from something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As if something terrible was lurking in the immediate future.

Y’know, I kind of like my foreshadowing without the anvil, but whatever.

Travis and Shepley have arranged for the apartment to be filled with bouquets for the girls, thus fitting the traditional toxic relationship pattern of making big grand romantic gestures without underlying healthy romantic patterns. As we see a few minutes later, when Travis complains again about Abby’s skirt being too short and her dress being too low-cut in the back. Though on this occasion she actually manages to persuade him to let her keep it on for the evening, so… that’s actually something.

They go to the party. Somebody called Brad Pierce notices Travis’s wrist tattoo:

“Dude, you got your girl’s name on your wrist? What in the hell possessed you to do that?” Brad said.

He doesn’t have Abby’s name on his wrist, he has the word ‘Pigeon’. Bit odd that Brad’s jumping straight to assuming it’s Abby’s name.

Travis and Abby dance. She tells him she’s hopelessly in love with him and he makes a speech that would indeed have been beautifully romantic if we hadn’t already seen all the toxicity.

After a few songs and one hostile, yet entertaining moment between Lexie and America

(sigh) All right, all right, I’ll bite… (back to copy of ‘Beautiful)

[Abby and Trav are groping each other while dancing]

“I guess we know what the appeal is,” Lexie sneered from behind us.

America spun, stomping toward Lexie on the warpath. Shepley grabbed her just in time.

“Say it again!” America said. “I dare you, bitch!”

Lexie cowered behind her boyfriend, shocked at America’s threat.

“Better get a muzzle on your date, Brad,” Travis warned.

One, thanks for that lovely bit of misogyny in the last line there. Two, anyone remember America’s ‘Vegas threw up on a flock of vultures’ sneer and how nobody seemed to object to that? But heaven forfend Lexie say that Abby and Trav’s attraction seems to be sexual. Can’t have anyone suggesting that perhaps their attraction is sexual even when they’re making it beyond obvious that it is.

Anyway, back to ‘Walking’. Trav and Abby go upstairs and out onto the balcony, where they catch Parker with his hand up a girl’s skirt. Parker gets his hand out quickly and they all do the awkward ‘so, how’ve you been?’ thing, and the girl (Amber, in case it ever comes up again) looks disgusted at meeting both of them because of course we have to establish that all other women except America are Abby’s enemies. Bleagh.

Anyway, Parker and Amber get out of there in a hurry and Abby and Travis stand there chatting, and Travis, referencing his new tattoo, says this:

“If it feels this good to have this on my arm, I can’t imagine how it’s going to feel to get a ring on your finger.”

“Travis…”

“In four, or maybe five years,” I said, inwardly cringing that I went that far.

To my genuine surprise, Abby actually responds sensibly to this.

Abby took a breath. “We need to slow down. Way, way down.”

“Don’t start this. Pidge.”

“If we keep going at this pace, I’m going to be barefoot and pregnant before I graduate. I’m not ready to move in with you, I’m not ready for a ring, and I’m certainly not ready to settle down.”

Excellent. Abby’s spotted what a bad idea it is to rush into assumptions about marriage at this point – even apart from Travis’s issues, they’re 19 and 20 and have only known each other a few months and are still in full on NRE! – and has set a clear-cut boundary about it.

So, of course Travis apologises for rushing and reassures her that he sees what she means and will back off and allow this to develop at a more sensible pace reacts like a pillock.

I gently cupped her shoulders. “This isn’t the ‘I wanna see other people’ speech, is it? Because I’m not sharing you. No fucking way.”

No, Travis, it’s the ‘You’re rushing far too fast and I’m setting some boundaries’ speech. Rather than respond to what Abby’s actually saying, you’re objecting to something she never said. This is an example of derailing. Oh, and strawmanning.

Abby insists she doesn’t want anyone else, and Travis asks her ‘What are you saying, then?’ because actually taking what she’s clearly saying at face value would obviously be too much to accept of him. Abby reiterates it, and at least Trav doesn’t try to strawman it this time, but he’s still not happy:

“It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back, Pidge.

No, Trav… you both took one step forward and then you tried to lunge about ten more steps forward without checking what she wanted and now you’re complaining because it turns out she doesn’t want to lunge forward with you.

Every time I think we’re on the same page, you put up a wall. I don’t get it … most girls are hounding their boyfriends to get serious, to talk about their feelings, to take the next step …”

“I thought we established that I’m not most girls?”

Because, as always, it’s vitally important to establish that Abby is Not Like Other Girls ™ and this is far more of a priority than questioning whether Travis is even right here. I mean, not that we have any reason to suspect that a raging misogynist whose contacts with women have consisted almost entirely of having quickies on the couch and then kicking them out might be wrong in his assumptions about what ‘most girls’ think, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of nineteen-year-old college students of any gender who actually aren’t in a hurry to settle down permanently with one person.

Also, I’m now picturing Abby putting up a wall on a page, and thus have images of one of those 3D pop-up books.

Anyway, Trav asks where she sees this going and Abby says that when she thinks about her future she sees him, which is enough to placate him. They stand there and share a pleasant moment which is interrupted by America bursting in to warn Abby that her father now knows where she is. It seems he kept pestering Abby’s mother, who wouldn’t tell him, and he eventually got the idea of phoning America’s family, whereupon America’s father decided that he had ‘a right’ to know and told him. Many thumbs down for America’s father. Do not do this, people. If someone’s hiding from a family member there’s probably a very good reason why.

Abby panics at the idea of her father turning up. Travis promises to protect her. Abby runs out, desperate to get away from the party.

I had only heard about Mick Abernathy’s accolades as a poker player from my father. Watching Abby run like a frightened little girl made me hate any time my family wasted being in awe of him.

And thus I am actually in the rare position of approving wholeheartedly of something Travis thinks. Despite having grown up hearing about how awesome this guy is, when he sees how upset Abby is over this he does a 180^o on the subject straight away. No ‘but he can’t be that bad!’, no ‘surely you should give him a chance…’ no ‘but what a cool poker player he is!’; just straight into believing and accepting Abby’s word on the matter. I honestly think this is the first time Travis has done something I actively like.

Anyway, as they’re charging out, America spots Mick Abernathy, who is described as ‘an older, slovenly man, unshaven and dirty to the point where he looked like he smelled’. He’s showing a photo to a group of people who are nodding at it, so the implication apparently is that he’s looking for Abby and they’re confirming that she was at the party.

Abby promptly changes tack on the whole trying-to-avoid-him thing and instead storms up to him to ask what he’s doing there and tell him to get out. The answer to the first question is, apparently, that he’s trying to hit her up for money. Despite that, the first thing he says to her, while looking at her dress and making disapproving noises, is “Well, well, Cookie. You can take the girl out of Vegas – ” Am I reading that wrong or did he just start out by slut-shaming the person he’s about to ask for a colossal favour?

It transpires that Mick owes $25,000 to someone called Benny, who is apparently the sort of person you really don’t want to be in debt to if you want to keep all your limbs, and he’s come to get the money from his teenage daughter, because, hey, let’s stay classy… and he can’t even manage to be polite to her or her boyfriend while he’s doing this:

Mick’s eyes rolled over me, from my face to my shoes. “Who’s this clown?”

To which Travis responds with ‘I can see, now, why a smart guy like yourself has been reduced to asking your teenage daughter for an allowance’, thus doubling the occasions so far in this book in which I have liked something he’s done. Travis, you are on a roll here; keep up the good work.

Abby admits to having $11,000, which she apparently made by betting on Travis’s fights. When? She went to one fight that we heard about. I looked back and Travis mentioned having a couple more fights in the time Abby was staying at the apartment for the bet, so she could have bet on those. Since Travis is supposedly superb at fighting, the odds on him wouldn’t give her a huge return for each sum of money she bet. To make $11,000 in three fights, wouldn’t she have had to have massive amounts of stake money to start with? Also, how much is Adam taking in entry fees in order to be able to take bets with that kind of likely payout?

Anyway, Mick reckons she’ll be able to double that in a weekend (by playing poker, I assume), and thus bail him out. Abby makes the mistake of trying to argue a rearguard action instead of just giving him a hard no:

“It’ll clean me out, Mick. I have to pay for school,” Abby said, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Oh, you can make it back in no time,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

Father of the year, clearly. On the plus side, it makes a very nice change for the slimeball to be the designated slimeball rather than the designated love interest.

Travis continues his run of actual likeability by pointing out to Abby that she doesn’t have to give him anything. Mick tries some shitty guilt trip about how it’s the least Abby can do because, supposedly, he wouldn’t be in this mess if not for her:

America slapped his hand away and then shoved him. “Don’t you dare start that shit again, Mick! She didn’t make you borrow money from Benny!”

Mick glared at Abby. The light of hatred in his eyes made any connection with her as his daughter disappear. “If it weren’t for her, I woulda had my own money. You took everything from me, Abby. I have nothin’!”

Abby tells him she’ll get him the money by Sunday, but this is the last time; from now on, he’s to stay away from her. Yup, I’m sure he’ll listen to that the next time he’s got himself in too deep with the wrong people. They head to the car, and:

America sighed. “Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Vegas.” She walked toward the Charger, and Shepley and I stood, frozen.

“Wait. What?” He looked to me. “Like Las Vegas, Vegas? As in Nevada?”

(I now want someone to say ‘As in the ‘threw up on a flock of vultures’ analogy from the first time you all went to the Red together.‘ Sadly, no-one does.)

“Looks that way,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

“We’re just going to book a flight to Vegas,” Shepley said, still trying to process the situation.

“Yep.”

So, they get in the car ready to make tracks for Vegas, the implication being that Abby’s going to try to win the money playing poker. I predict that this plan will work perfectly well and make her look even sexier to Travis into the bargain, because McGuire does not care what lessons she gives young people about sensible behaviour. Wait, no; the next chapter is called ‘You Win Some, You Lose Some’, so maybe Abby’ll just lose all her money. Anyway, chapter ends.