Marco’s gambling night on February 29, 2016, brings a long-buried friendship back into view and tests whether he will let fear decide his actions. Though his young niece Miraijin is feverish and an old friend warns that Dami Tamburini has hired him to ruin Marco, Marco refuses to go home. He stays, wins an enormous amount at Texas Hold’em, and makes the night’s decisive measure of luck not the cards but his bond with Miraijin and the man once known as Blizzard.

Background and the Decision to Play

February 29 matters to Marco because it comes only once every four years. He is not superstitious, the narration says, but numbers and recurrences still draw him; the rare date gives him a reason to play. That decision is complicated by Miraijin’s fever, which has reached 38 degrees. Marco has given her Tachipirina and judges that, if the fever rises, he can take her to a hospital in Siena. She seems comfortable enough to sleep, but he cannot stop thinking that he is behaving abjectly by leaving her to gamble.

The familiar arrangements offer reassurance without resolving that unease. Miraijin sleeps in the car between Florence and Vico Alto, wakes when they reach the villa, then falls asleep again in a hammock in the room known as the study of pain. Dami’s helper Manuel assists with their arrival, as he has before. Marco’s routine is intact; his worry is not. He is at the villa to play with Dami, his friend and doubles partner, when Dami introduces him to a new player. Marco shakes the man’s hand without recognizing him.

The Warning and the Recognition

Marco notices the stranger a second time and recognizes him from a distance. The man has been introduced as Blizzard, a name Marco remembers, but it takes that name and a closer look for recognition to become certainty. The stranger recognizes Marco immediately and, rather than discuss their past in the room, asks to be shown to a bathroom and leads him away from the host.

The reunion is startling because the man is Duccio Chilleri, Marco’s former friend. Nearly forty years earlier, Duccio had saved Marco’s life; later, he betrayed him and helped force him out of circulation. Marco had felt intense guilt about what happened, but Irene’s death two years afterward and the other misfortunes that followed displaced that guilt. For decades, Duccio had scarcely occupied his memory. Now, face to face with him again, Marco is astonished not only by Duccio’s changed appearance but by the realization that he had forgotten him.

In the bathroom, their reflections multiply in two opposing mirrors while Duccio delivers his warning: Marco should go home and not play. He says he is speaking as a friend, but Marco cannot readily separate concern from threat. He considers leaving, demanding an explanation for Duccio’s return, apologizing years too late, or answering with anger. Their meeting is not a simple reconciliation; the warning reopens the injury between them before either man can address it directly.

Duccio’s Work and the Threat at the Game

Duccio explains that people believe he brings bad luck to everyone except those who stay close to him. This is the so-called eye of the storm theory. After his reputation spread, he says, he began using it professionally: he is paid to bring misfortune to a chosen target. He tells Marco that Dami hired him to make Marco lose, and that he flew in that morning specifically to direct his bad-luck reputation at him. The requested outcome was to make Marco cry.

The revelation recasts the evening. Dami is not merely hosting a game between friends; according to Duccio, he has arranged to have Marco targeted, despite being Marco’s doubles partner. Duccio urges Marco to leave, repeating that the warning is serious. Marco, however, is less persuaded by the supposed power of bad luck than troubled by the betrayal that would make Dami seek his humiliation. The two men’s meeting therefore places the old rupture beside a new one: Duccio’s past betrayal and Dami’s present scheme are distinct, but each forces Marco to decide whom he can trust.

Miraijin as Marco’s Answer

Marco rejects the warning. He tells Duccio that he has never believed in his bad luck and had argued against those who did. He also acknowledges his own past wrong: he had been shocked, foolish, and alone, and Duccio had paid the consequences. Marco apologizes and says he would not repeat the mistake. He adds that he owes Duccio his life, and therefore has no reason to fear him.

Marco then turns the conversation from luck to what he has at stake. He leads Duccio quietly into the study of pain, where Miraijin is asleep in the hammock. He gently returns her dangling arm to her lap and kisses her forehead, then tells Duccio that she is his five-and-a-half-year-old niece and that he is with her wherever she is. His poker name, Hanmokku, comes from the hammock. In this private scene, Miraijin is not an abstract reason to stay at the table: she is the child Marco has brought with him, feverish but asleep, and the person around whom he has organized his life.

The room also gives Marco a way to answer Duccio’s account of bad luck without claiming that misfortune is unreal. Their former shared life included skiing, music, and gambling, but time has changed them both. Marco sees Duccio as alone and aged, while he himself remains active and can look toward a future because Miraijin is in it. He interprets the hammock, his decision to use it, and the series of losses and love that have led him there as converging on this particular February 29. For him, what has happened is no longer merely a succession of blows; it has become strength and purpose centered on the child.

The Game and Its Aftermath

Marco returns to play instead of obeying Duccio’s warning. In a later account, he recalls seeing the old friend at the place where he had been playing almost every week for three years. Because the players use pseudonyms, Duccio initially knew that Hanmokku was the target without realizing that Hanmokku was Marco. Once he recognized him, he took him aside and explained that the host wanted to ruin him. Marco stayed nonetheless.

The consequences were substantial. Marco says he won an absurd amount of money, and later clarifies that he had sat down to play for a sum he did not possess, one that would have badly disrupted his life had he lost. His account identifies the decisive hand as a Jack of diamonds against a Jack of clubs in Texas Hold’em. Dami, the doubles partner who had wanted to see him cry, was the person against whom Marco won. The victory does not erase the betrayal or settle the damaged friendship, but it reverses the intended outcome of the evening: the hired warning fails to drive Marco away, and the man meant to be ruined leaves with the win.

The night’s culminating image is not the money but the contrast between the two men’s circumstances. Duccio arrives as a paid embodiment of bad luck and insists that Marco escape it; Marco stays because he rejects that power and knows what he is protecting. His parting principle to Duccio is that wolves do not kill unfortunate deer but weak ones. The line turns the game’s result into a statement about endurance: Marco’s past contains betrayal and repeated loss, yet he refuses to treat suffering as proof that he must yield. February 29 becomes both a risky return to gambling and a moment when he understands his attachment to Miraijin as the future that gives his survival meaning.