Part 7: The Real Owner of the Ticket… And Why Maya Was Chosen 
The warehouse went completely silent.
Not normal silence.
The kind where your brain refuses to process what it just heard.
Daniel stared at the folder.
Then at me.
Then back at the woman.
“What do you mean… used her?”
The woman folded her gloves carefully.
“Three weeks before the jackpot, the lottery terminal at Mrs. Lupita’s store was remotely accessed.”
I shook my head immediately.
“That’s impossible.”
“No,” she replied calmly.
“Just expensive.”
The gray-haired man looked deeply uncomfortable now.
Richard looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole.
Daniel stepped closer to the woman.
“Start talking clearly.”
She nodded once.
“The winning ticket was legitimate. The numbers existed. The payout exists. Taxes were paid legally.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem,” she said quietly,
“is that the ticket may never have been intended for Maya.”
Cold spread through my chest.
I whispered:
“…What?”
The woman opened another document.
“There are indications someone manipulated the system before the draw.”
Daniel frowned.
“To guarantee the numbers?”
“No. That would be too visible.”
“Then what?”
She looked directly at me.
“To guarantee who received the winning ticket.”
I felt dizzy.
“That makes no sense.”
“It does if someone needed a clean citizen with no criminal record, modest income, stable taxes, and no major investigations tied to their name.”
Daniel’s face slowly changed.
Like pieces were connecting inside his head.
Then he looked at me carefully.
“You bought the ticket after work, right?”
“Yes…”
“At the exact same store you always use?”
“Yes.”
The woman nodded slightly.
“Patterns matter.”
Then she pulled out another photo.
Security footage from the store.
Timestamped.
I moved closer slowly.
And my stomach dropped.
A man appeared on-screen near the lottery machine minutes before I bought the ticket.
Black baseball cap.
Gray jacket.
Face mostly hidden.
But what terrified me wasn’t him.
It was what he was doing.
Opening the back panel of the machine.
Daniel whispered:
“What the hell…”
The woman continued:
“The machine briefly disconnected from the lottery network before reconnecting.”
I looked at her.
“You think that man planted the winning ticket?”
“We think the system was manipulated to direct a pre-selected winning sequence toward a specific purchaser profile.”
Daniel stared in disbelief.
“That sounds insane.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“But so does a random seventy-eight million dollar jackpot appearing directly beside multiple active laundering investigations.”
The warehouse suddenly felt freezing again.
Richard muttered weakly:
“I told them she didn’t know…”
The woman ignored him.
Then she looked at me with strange intensity.
“Maya… did anything unusual happen that day?”
I opened my mouth.
Stopped.
Because suddenly…
