One evening at around this time last year Sandy Grant walked into Our Market in Oak Bluffs and came out a few minutes later scratching her head. She appeared to have won $10 million.

Ms. Grant went back inside to get a second opinion on the Billion Dollar Blockbuster ticket. The cashier confirmed it: she was officially the biggest winner in the history of scratch cards.

Today she is hosing down her Ford truck and horse trailer outside the Katama home she has owned for 25 years, washing off salt from a recent trip to snowy Vermont, where she was delivering a horse for a seasonal resident.

Ms. Grant has been hauling horses on and off-Island for years.

“I’m basically a horse taxi,” she says.

The Ford is in immaculate condition, aside from the salt. Did she pick it up with lottery winnings?

“No,” she says, “I bought it before all that rigamarole.”

Inside the modular home at the front of the property, there is little evidence of her windfall.

The white walls are still spare, cardboard boxes are piled up on the sofa and the space appears to be unheated. MTV Cribs will not be visiting anytime soon. In fact none of the standard hallmarks of lottery-related excess seem to apply to Ms. Grant.

“When I’m at the store, if I see someone who doesn’t have a lot of money I’ll wait in line and pay their order,” she offers. Instead of putting a dollar in the Salvation Army collection kettle, she’ll put in $5 or $10.

“I think about [what I’m going to give to charity] all the time,” she says, “there’s a lot of bad stuff going on out there.”

She is down from three jobs to one and a half. Before her win she worked as a taxi driver, delivered horses and drove the cruise bus. This summer she drove only seven or eight times, and just because she missed it.

“I miss doing the taxi too,” she says. “You really get to talk to people and see these big beautiful houses that you don’t even know exist.”

She won’t be getting one of those herself?

“Well, no, right now I’m concentrating on the garage,” she says. Ms. Grant lives in the garage section of the main house.

She spent years busing people on cruise holidays around the Island. And when she won the lottery she wanted to go on one herself; she looked into it right after she got the first installment of her winnings.

But in the process of applying for a passport Ms. Grant, who is an orphan, found she had two different birth dates registered with the town of Edgartown.

The discrepancy caused a three-month delay obtaining the passport, nixing a winter cruise.

Her papers are in order now though.

“I thought I’d go to the travel agent, see what there is,” she says, swinging her small feet in front of her chair.

Before her win Ms. Grant would buy two or three scratch cards a week. Are they still a habit?

“Once in a while I get some for him,” she says nodding at her boyfriend Larry Schneider, who has joined her in the front room. “He hopes my luck will rub off.” (It hasn’t, he says.)

“She still uses coupons,” says Mr. Schneider, sipping a cup of coffee in his house slippers.

“Not really,” she says.

“You do sometimes,” he insists.

“I’m not as thrifty anymore, but I look at the sale items at Stop & Shop and I go off-Island to shop most of the time,” she says.

While many may be worrying about paying their bills this winter, Sandy Grant worries about spending.

“I look for bills to pay when I go to the post office; I want to pay them,” she said.

Just like the bills before, the winnings themselves became a concern after the scratch card. This time last year she was having trouble sleeping thinking about it all.

“I’ve read about lottery winners. There’s a lot of horror stories. But I’ve stopped being nervous about it,” she says, “I do things more leisurely now.”

She did get an off-Island car — leased, for tax purposes — which she keeps at a friend’s house in Falmouth. “I like convenience,” she says.

This summer she wore sunglasses and a hat as a disguise riding her bike around town. Ms. Grant makes an unlikely celebrity, but the precaution was just to limit the questions on why her lifestyle hasn’t changed.

“People ask, why are you riding a bike still? Well, because I don’t want to get stuck in jams,” she says.

A friend read in the newspaper that a fly swatter was a priority purchase last year and bought her one.

Other than all that, things are pretty much the same.

Oh, and she does have team of accountants, bank managers and an official financial advisor now.

“Larry and I talk to my financial advisor three times a week,” she says. The advisor is a 27-year-old from North Carolina recommended by Northeastern Funding Group, the clients who ultimately bought Ms. Grant’s ticket.

“He’s super smart, he’s young, he’s hungry,” says Mr. Schneider. “This guy saved a lot of money right up front. It’s astounding how much he saved.”

Mr. Schneider, a consultant who previously worked on town boards in Lower Macungie, in the Poconos, has helped Ms. Grant through the purchase and investing process.

He explains the decision to sell the ticket to a corporate buyer for a single lump sum rather than eke it out in 20 years of installments. Had she stayed on the state installments, it would have taken three years to become a millionaire. Also it would have added up to just over $6 million after taxes. Selling to Northeastern, she ended up with about half of what the prize was on the scratch card. But now she is free to invest the money, and Mr. Schneider estimates that she could have $20 million by the time her installments would have come through from the state.

Mr. Schneider says it became almost a full-time job for him managing and tracking the money.

“I’ve been reading Forbes, watching the stock market, all that,” he says.

The biggest chunk of her money is fully insured, a good move during a financial crisis, Mr. Schneider observes.

“Candidly, that’s the best move she’s made,” he says. “So many people tried to play games with Sandy.”

As the world’s biggest winner she was a prize account for many firms and she would receive teaser checks in the mail made out to her for $5,000 or $10,000.

One firm offered free Superbowl tickets. But they were also offering half the amount of the highest bidder.

“It was all Greek without him,” she says of Mr. Schneider, “I keep asking why couldn’t I just stick it all under a mattress?”