PART 1

My husband, Arthur, always swung too hard on the third hole because he refused to accept that his swing had a natural slice. We were playing our usual Sunday round at Oak Creek, the grass still damp from the morning sprinklers, when he shanked a six-iron so badly it hooked off the fairway and crashed straight through the glass window of a very expensive house bordering the course. The sound of shattering double-pane glass made my stomach drop.

“Arthur, you told me you adjusted your stance,” I said, putting my club back into the bag.

“The wind caught it,” he muttered, adjusting the collar of his polo shirt with that familiar stubborn twitch in his jaw. “Come on. Let us go apologize before someone calls the pro shop.”

We walked across the manicured lawn, stepping carefully over scattered shards of glass on the patio. The sliding glass door stood wide open, and an elderly man with a silver beard wearing an embroidered velvet robe was sitting in a velvet armchair inside the sunlit living room. He was sipping tea from a delicate china cup as if nothing had just crashed through his window.

Before Arthur could stammer out his rehearsed apology about insurance and property damage, the man set his teacup down on a glass coffee table with a sharp clink.

“Thank you for breaking that vase!” the man said, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. “I am a genie who was trapped inside for one thousand years.

I will grant you three wishes, but I get one for myself.”

PART 2

Arthur did not blink. He did not ask questions. The greed that usually hid behind his boardroom smiles flared up instantly in his eyes. Without looking at me, without even checking if the man was serious, Arthur stepped forward and started naming his demands like a man placing an order at a drive-thru.

“A million dollars a year, tax-free, deposited into my accounts forever,” Arthur blurted out, his voice shaking with excitement. “And a mansion in every country on earth, fully staffed and maintained.”

The genie smiled, a slow and knowing stretch of his lips, and snapped his fingers. A heavy golden ledger materialized on the coffee table, along with a stack of property deeds that smelled faintly of old parchment.

“Done,” the genie said. “Your wealth is secured. Every property is deeded in your name alone.”

Arthur let out a breathless laugh, turning to look at me as if he had just won the lottery through sheer brilliance. “Did you hear that, Claire? We are rich. We are untouchable.”

The genie leaned back in his velvet chair, steepling his long fingers together, and looked past Arthur straight at me. “And now,” the genie said smoothly, “for my one wish. I just want to spend one night with your beautiful wife.”

I waited for Arthur to balk. I waited for him to remember that he had a wife standing three feet away, that marriage meant something more than a tax shelter, that my dignity was not a bargaining chip for his real estate portfolio.

Instead, Arthur hesitated for less than a second. He looked at me, then looked back at the genie, and gave a nervous, eager shrug.

“Go right ahead,” Arthur said, waving a hand toward the hallway. “Enjoy yourself.”