Page 289 of Double or Nothing

Her limit is approaching.

Not her financial limit. Someone like Dalloway has no meaningful financial limit at this level. Her limit is embarrassment. The price where winning becomes harder to explain than losing.

Foster offers three twenty. Go him.

Dalloway pauses.

The auctioneer turns towards her.

“At three hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Are you finished?” he asks her.

Foster glances down at his cuff. He’s pretending not to care.

Dalloway sees it. Her eyes narrow and her paddle rises.

“Three forty.”

Foster folds.

Just like that.

His catalogue opens again.

Dalloway wins a pile of twisted metal for almost three times its opening bid, and she’s smiling.

Lot 22 comes and goes.

Lot 23 is ours.

Not Alice’s.

A portrait by Esme Calder, the artist who obscures faces beneath gold leaf. The Gilded Table expressed interest weeks ago, and Bryce genuinely loves the work.

This one is for him.

The auctioneer opens at one hundred and eighty thousand.

A telephone bidder takes it to two.

Someone online offers two twenty.

I enter at two forty.

No drama. No flourish. Just the paddle.

The telephone bidder responds.

Two sixty.

I bid two eighty.

The online bidder disappears.

The telephone bidder takes longer this time. Almost there.

Three hundred.

I answer immediately.