I don’t really know when he started the liquidation, but one day not too long after he made his play, Atlanta Game Factory closed for business. Dollar Bill did nothing. I wasn’t in a position to do anything. And suddenly there was no longer a game store in Atlanta. The fixtures were sold off and all that remains to this day is a pile of shelf pegs, MAGIC commons, paper cups, and debris swept in the middle of the store with that shrink-wrapped copy of DINO HUNT wedged unceremoniously at its crown.

And the sign is still there. I’ve thought about going and getting it many times, but I’d have to hire a crane to get it down.

So that’s it. The life and death of the Atlanta Game Factory, the zero-sum equation of hard work, passion, and dedication waylaid by greed, foolishness, and recklessness. If you want the big finale, it’s just not there. It ends with a muffled whimper, like it always does when the good guys lose.

The big question in the aftermath is: Why didn’t I do more? With The Barrister’s debt saddling the store’s earnings and the amount of damage and devaluation he had incurred even in just a couple of weeks, it probably wasn’t worth it from a financial standpoint. Realistically, the cost of getting back into the store would have been more than enough to start a whole new store and that wouldn’t have included any kind of legal expenses or the freshly minted debt he had racked up by ordering new product on thirty day terms with several distributors. I didn’t have the leverage or positioning to do anything by myself and Dollar Bill’s frivolous disinterest in taking action meant that we pretty much just had to watch him run the place into the ground and scurry off, never to blight us with his presence again.

I don’t even really know what happened to The Barrister, but I assume that he likely retreated into suburbia and made his mark among the statistics tracking the American traditions of loan defaults, credit card debt and bankruptcy. I wonder if he throws up in his mouth when he sees a board game. I hope that he does because I know it makes him think of me.

I still think about the store every day. It was a much bigger part of my life than it was his, even though its concrete financial repercussions likely haunt his every step. There isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t think about what could have been, about where the store would be today. Just a couple of weeks ago, when it started to get hot here in Atlanta, I was thinking about those hot summer days when The Kid and I would drive out in Friday afternoon traffic to the local distributor to make sure that we had enough cards for Friday Night Magic in my air conditioner-less truck. When it’s cold out I think about the time the heater broke down and everybody was playing games in ski jackets and overcoats. When I see new games come out I wonder how they would have sold and if my customers would have been interested in them. I’m thinking about what I’d be doing there right now and realizing that writing this story wouldn’t be it.

But I’m not quite done. We’re heading into epilogue. There still will be games.

One day in March or April I took a bunch of CDs to sell to a bookstore around the corner from my house. The reason? Fantasy Flight Games had just put out their reissue of FURY OF DRACULA and I had to have it, unemployment be damned. I scraped together barely enough cash for it but then I realized that I had nowhere to go buy it in Atlanta and also that the days of getting games at wholesale prices was over.