Mac Coltrane’s sheets were a little bit scratchy, which also described his mood.

They were about a three hundred thread count. And cheap. He liked that they had body and heft and didn’t cling to him on hot nights or tempt him into lingering in bed, and they had cost practically nothing, and these days he knew the cost of everything.

He didn’t like anything that clung. Or tempted him to linger.

And that included nearly every tie of every kind.

Except, well, maybe the goats. He was pretty committed to the goats.

But his bed was vast, because he was a restless sleeper. He often woke up diagonally across it, limbs flung out, like he was afraid someone would steal his territory. Once upon a time, a lifetime ago, it seemed, when he was test driving the kind of lifestyle one expected of a billionaire’s son, he’d slept on satin sheets. Until that night he’d rolled over and his shifting knee had accidentally punted his date out the other end of the bed. She’d emerged with a soft plop onto the floor as if she’d gone down a waterslide, astonished. They’d laughed like giddy fools. That was a few months before his whole world caved in.

He’d gone from knowing exactly who he was, where he was from, and where he was going to feeling as blank as the checks his dad used to give him.

And just as worthless as those checks would be now.

He’d shifted the rubble painstakingly off himself, one piece at a time, as strategical as a Jenga player and as methodical as any crew sent in to free survivors of earthquake wreckage. The hard way, step by step, he learned exactly who he was.

Someone who got what he wanted.

In some ways, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. As the saying went. Even if the tree was in prison for fraud.

“When the bidding starts, put me on speaker. I want to hear it.”

“Of course, Mr. Coltrane.” His attorney’s tone didn’t at all betray that Mac had said this to him a hundred times. Mac liked to subtly tweak Graybill, who was English, starchy, correct, and possibly the most literal man Mac had ever met.

Because, well, frankly, “smartass” was another of the things Mac Coltrane definitively was.

“Have you changed your bidding cap, sir?”

“Well, I checked the dryer, the sofa cushions, and all the pockets of my clothes, and came up with nada. So no.”

He’d also checked the mailbox, and no promised big white envelope from Mike was there, either. He wished he was surprised by this.

“Ha ha. Ha. Very well, sir.”

Graybill was humoring him. Mac suppressed a grin.

Like his father, Mac had the knack for turning virtually nothing into something, and then something into something big. Methodically and skillfully, but not as quickly as he would have preferred. Because unlike his father, he had a little thing about doing it the right way.

Graybill had worked for Dixon Coltrane and was perhaps the only person on staff who’d managed to remain untainted by the scandal. And Mac knew Graybill shared some of his own life philosophy about how to stay on the straight and narrow.

And he, just like Mac, knew of one possible way Mac could significantly change his bidding cap. He also knew it would be a cold day in hell before he took that route. Because it would involve forgiving.

How about that. There was yet another way Mac was his father’s son: he was implacable when he decided not to forgive.

“Okay then. To reiterate: the bidding cap is still three hundred. And that’s firm because it has to be. But I doubt we’ll even hit two hundred.”

He didn’t mention all the reasons he didn’t think they’d hit that cap: the grounds were gorgeous, but Hellcat Canyon was in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, California; the house was immense, idiosyncratic, costly to maintain—beautiful but ridiculous. It needed updating. Rumor had it there was also a ghost. He’d never met the ghost, but then he’d lived there during the summers only, sometimes not even a whole summer, for just short of eight years.

But there were other ghosts. These were more of the figurative kind. For instance, sometimes when he closed his eyes after staring into the sun an image would hover for an instant behind his lids: a girl with big mahogany eyes filled with gold lights, her hair a few shades deeper in color, impossibly gleaming. But there had never been anything ethereal about her. He knew, because he’d held her. She was the realest person he’d ever known. The truest thing he’d ever felt.

She’d wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher and she loved animals, and he supposed that described millions of girls. “A common little person,” his dad had called her. Among other things.

It took Mac years to fully understand now how definitively untrue this was.

She had disappeared, however.

So she had that in common with a ghost.

And maybe all of that had been an illusion after all, like everything else in his life had turned out to be.

It took him a long time to adjust to her absence. He hadn’t realized that she was the lens he’d begun to see nearly everything through. That even though she was kind of a secret, she was also, in a way, his center of gravity. And when it was clear he was just never going to see her again, life had taken on a peculiar, almost dreamlike quality. What he did had ceased to matter because nothing had consequences in a dream.

Hence the foray into satin sheets. Life in general had become a satin sheet. Superfluously decadent; nothing of substance adhered.

He was aware he didn’t like to say her name in his mind. Which meant it had more power over him than he preferred any soul to have.

That was a helluva long time ago, though. A fair number of women ago. His parents’ divorce ago. His father’s indictment ago. The national guard ago. Backpacking through Europe ago.

Somehow all of that had led him back to here about three years ago, thanks to Morton Horton and the goats.

For about two decades he’d been untangling the skein of his life as if it were a wad of Christmas tree lights, all of them burnt out save one.

That light was the house at Devil’s Leap.

And he knew Graybill thought he was nuts. Mac hadn’t done an irrational, unplanned thing in about two decades.

But he didn’t feel the need to explain to Graybill why this was, in fact, the most rational thing he’d ever done in his life. If there was one thing Mac loathed, it was revealing anything that might be construed as a vulnerability.

Publicity came in a close second in the loathing department. He’d had enough of that for a lifetime.

Which was why Graybill would be doing the bidding for him tomorrow.

“Yes, sir. I understand the cap.”

“Until tomorrow then. Thanks, Graybill.”

“Until tomorrow, Mr. Coltrane.”

Mac signed off and stood up abruptly from his perch on the end of the bed and opened the door to let in The Cat, who laced himself around his shins without quite touching them, The Cat’s version of an air kiss. The Cat had showed up one day about a year and a half ago and never left. Mac poured some kibble into the bowl, then turned around for a last look at the room, at all the minimalist decorating at its finest. The shotgun over the door. The vast bed. The shelf alongside it holding all of his i-gadgets.

Next to those, a collection of neatly stacked tie boxes.

Mac couldn’t forgive, but he couldn’t seem to get rid of those, either.

Through the transom window of this cottage the big old Victorian house seemed etched into the night sky, just a few shades less dark. For three years now it had been a hundred-some-odd feet yet two hundred light years away.

He doubted he’d sleep tonight.

Tomorrow at nine a.m. was the hour when that gap would close and he, like every Coltrane had stretching back at least a century, would do the inevitable: get exactly what he wanted.

Avalon roared into the courthouse parking lot at about three minutes to nine, skidded to a sideways halt, yanked her seatbelt out of its socket like it had taken her hostage, and all but toppled out of the car, scrambling gracelessly upright and ramming her hip but good on the door frame in the process. She took three leg-dragging, whimpering, Quasimodo-esque steps to adapt to that little mishap, sucking air in between her teeth against the pain.

Fuck fuck fuck.

She had three minutes. Elbows tucked into her side, head down, morning air whistling through her ears that had always stuck out just a little more than she preferred, hoping the little butt nudge she’d given the car door was enough to swing it closed, but not staying to hear the click.

If only everyone in Hellcat Canyon wasn’t so freaking nice. She’d planned to be the first person in line before the credit union opened this morning; she was the second. The first was Mrs. Corcoran, who was eighty-seven and had brought with her a coffee can full of dimes.

“Boy, you must have been saving these for decades, Mrs. Corcoran! If dimes could talk, I bet they’d have a tale to tell. Let me get those wrappers for you . . .”

To keep from hyperventilating and frightening both Mrs. Corcoran and the sweet, helpful clerk, Avalon multitasked.

To her current assistant (Kenneth? Daria! No! It was Enrique—staff turnover among young, flaky, skilled tech workers was so high she sometimes forgot who was on deck), she sent a text:

“Okay, now you have five dollars, Mrs. Corcoran . . . I remember when I could get a whole breakfast down at the Misty Cat for five dollars, don’t you . . . ? I like the Hellcat Scramble myself . . .”

Then it was time to put a stop to Corbin’s thirty-five texts:

“Handling” things was basically Corbin’s worst nightmare. The administrative day-to-day decision-making was so so so so torturous for someone of his genius caliber.

How fascinating to live in a world where people ended up doing things for you just because you didn’t want to. How very like a Pasha.

The anger was almost as good as the coffee she desperately needed.

Almost.

“Okay, now you have fifteen dollars, Mrs. Corcoran . . . whoopsie! This is a Canadian dime! Ha ha ha! Now, how did that get in there? Did I tell you I went to Vancouver over the summer . . .”

Avalon was officially hyperventilating now. She shot Rachel a quick text:

Finally, a yawning clerk opened another window. Perhaps alerted by a manic gleam in Avalon’s eye, she dispensed with pleasantries and got right down to it.

A few minutes later Avalon bolted out of the credit union like she’d just robbed it with an all-but-drained personal bank account and a stack of cashier’s checks. Which is what the website had instructed her to do.

And she was going to be on time! She was going to make it! She might even be a minute earl—

Fuck.

She came to a screeching halt. The Hellcat Canyon courthouse had been built around 1870. It was handsome, modestly scaled, white domed, Doric of column and marble of foyer.

And it was situated at the top of at least thirty fucking granite steps.

Why, Hellcat Canyon? Why? To make rash brides and grooms think twice before getting hitched by a justice of the peace? To make criminals think twice about making a break for it?

She whipped her sunglasses off and wiped the sweat and surrendered to a split second of crushing doubt, her lungs already burning and heaving. Maybe the universe was trying to protect her from yet another metaphorical bike jump across Whiskey Creek.

She tipped her head back and stood on her toes. About a half dozen people were milling about the courtyard fountain, each of them limned in the rose-gold of an early morning autumn sun. Her competition.

Suddenly a big guy in suspenders and a denim shirt stretched tautly over his barrel torso burst from the courthouse double doors like a cuckoo from a clock and bustled over to the fountain. He flourished a clipboard. The little crowd surged toward him.

Her phone pinged.

Another freaking text from Corbin.

She growled ferally, jerked her head away from it exactly as if he was forcing her to stare at his bobbing white butt again. Her back teeth clamped down hard.

The anger was a gift. It was all the adrenaline she needed.

She took a deep gulp of air like a deep sea diver and all but hurled her body forward.

Bam Bam Bam. Bam. The hard fall of her feet on the steps vibrated her teeth; her breath roared in her ears. She was reasonably fit thanks to San Francisco’s hills, but her only goal in life at this moment was to not throw up before she reached the top, and hopefully not even then.

The entire group pivoted to stare wonderingly at her.

She managed to stand regally erect for three triumphant seconds, hands planted on her hips, smiling enigmatically, the breeze whipping her ponytail sideways.

Before she buckled in two like a two-by-four sliced by a karate chop. Black spots danced before her eyes. Wheezing, she waved away the concerned feet she saw from her bent position. A couple of pairs of John Deere work boots, a pair of Nikes, a pair of handmade loafers so shiny she could see herself in the toes.

She levered herself upright a few seconds later. Sweaty and more than a little nauseated, but then, she was an old hand at both of those conditions.

Everyone was still staring at her. They now, to a man (they were all men), seemed faintly alarmed.

She smiled placidly back at them.

Handmade Loafers was Los Angeles–thin and his gray hair was ruthlessly barbered. She would bet all of her cashier’s checks that he smelled like expensive aftershave. His charcoal-gray suit was meticulously tailored if unadventurous (though arguably, any suit in Hellcat Canyon would have been noteworthy). He looked like a G-man or a lawyer. Her money was on the latter.

She knew instinctively this was the guy to beat.

She scanned them and summed them up as Overalls, Cardigan, Timid Guy, Button-down Shirt, and Handmade Loafers. A fly had begun orbiting all of them. Avalon was a little worried she was the attraction. She needed a shower.

She was the only woman, the only one in black, the only one in yoga pants; the only one in sunglasses, a sweaty T-shirt, messy high ponytail, and a cardigan speckled with lint. These were all the things she’d found in her gym bag. The blazer she’d worn to speak to the young entrepreneurs yesterday was hopelessly crumpled.

But one thing she’d learned in her by-the-seat-of-her-pants school of business was when you’re feeling underdressed, too young, too . . . female . . . in a room full of men: hold yourself as if you own the place. As if you’ve graciously granted everyone present audience and they are there on your sufferance.

“Good morning, folks!” The auctioneer boomed into the sleepy silence, which made everyone give a little start. “I’m Chuck Beasley, and I’ll be your ringmaster for today’s proceedings. Today you’ll be bidding on the beautiful fairy-tale Victorian manse at Devil’s Leap, once belonging to the storied Coltrane billionaire dynasty, whose history stretches back a few hundred years and contains heroes and rogues alike. Three thousand five hundred square feet, ten rooms, five bathrooms, breathtaking grounds, glorious hardwood parquet floors, nine-foot ceilings, and as if that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a groundskeeper under contract through the end of the year. Presumably you’ve had a chance to review the photos online, yes?”

A sort of assenting murmur rustled through the little crowd. Avalon had spent the good portion of last night perusing all those photos. And the house looked the same inside as it had the last—and only—time she’d seen it. It did need some updating, a little TLC, and paint.

“Excellent!” Chuck Beasley was clearly a force of nature. “All bidding is at your own risk! Bid early, bid big, bid often, and bid at your own risk! Do we have an opening bid?”

“Fifty thousand,” said Overalls. Avalon had pegged him as the sort who was here for the spectacle, given that entertainment options in Hellcat Canyon ran the gamut between A (bingo at St. Anne’s) and B (whatever was going on at the Misty Cat or The Plugged Nickel). If you wanted to elevate your pulse at all in Hellcat Canyon you had to get creative.

“Do I hear fifty-five, fifty-five. Fifty-five,” Chuck Beasley ratta-tat-tatted in auctioneer cadence. “Fifty-five is peanuts for a magnificent house, are you clever people going to let this gentleman outsmart you and outbid you and take home a bargain? Give me fifty-five, fifty-five.”

Avalon raised her finger coolly.

“Lady in the shades bids fifty-five!” the auctioneer crowed. Every head whipped in her direction again. “Do I hear sixty thousand? Sixty thousand is pocket change for a Victorian palace, do I hear sixty thousand?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Avalon saw Handmade Loafers nod subtly.

“Sixty from the well-groomed gentleman!” Chuck Beasley bellowed with pleasure. “Do I hear sixty-five? Sixty-five thousand, you know you want it, you know you came to play, don’t be coy or it’ll get away. Who’ll give me sixty-five?”

“Sixty-five?” said Timid Guy in a little voice. Avalon was pretty sure that would be his first and last bid.

“We have sixty-five, and I know the rest of you can beat that. Do I hear seventy, seventy?”

“ONE HUNDRED,” shouted Button-down Shirt.

It caused a unanimous momentary blip of astonished silence.

“One fifty,” Avalon said coolly. Taking pains to sound bored. She glanced at her fingernails and frowned a little distractedly, as if dropping tens of thousands on property was something she did every day, so commonplace it was all she could do not to whip out her cell phone and start playing Words with Friends.

The auctioneer whistled low. “One fifty to our Lady in the Shades, who reveals herself to be hardcore. Now we got ourselves a horse race. Do I hear one fifty-five? One hundred fifty-five thousand for the house at Devil’s Leap?”

“One sixty,” Handmade Loafers said evenly. He had an English accent. That was interesting.

Avalon would love to beat out an Englishman.

She would love to beat any guy today.

“One seventy-five,” she all but drawled.

“Two hundred thousand,” he countered with great disinterest, before the auctioneer could even say a word.

Thus launched some swift-bidding ping-pong between the two of them.

Up the price went, up and up, with Chuck the auctioneer, who clearly could not believe his luck, merely shouting out their bids as they were made, until:

“Three hundred thousand dollars.”

Handmade Loafers laid those words down like crisp little bricks.

Overalls clutched his heart. Avalon hoped this was merely theatrics.

But sweet Jesus. She was tempted to do the same.

Three . . . hundred . . . thousand . . . dollars.

It sobered her into startled silence. The great weighty roundness of that number cut right through her buzz of defiance and determination. How had it come to this?

She did have the money.

And she’d have a little left. But it was everything she’d meticulously saved over the past two decades.

It was just definitely a lot higher than she thought she’d need to go. She and Corbin always kept money in reserve in case they needed to forego a paycheck, or cover an emergency contingency. Once or twice, early on, she’d dipped into her savings to help cover the GradYouAte payroll.

Clearly it was a lot higher than the auctioneer thought anyone would go, because it took him a good thirty seconds to recover his aplomb.

He cleared his throat.

“Do I hear three hundred five thousand dollars? Three five? Lady in the Shades, I know you don’t want to leave without this magnificent prize. Three hundred five thousand dollars is still a steal and I know you know it. Be the envy of all your friends, not to mention all these people standing around you. Be the enemy of this well-dressed gentleman. Are you going to let him get the better of you?”

Are you going to let him get the better of you? It was like the universe talking directly to her.

Her heart was slamming like bass in a disco.

“All right, then,” Chuck said matter-of-factly, rather sadly. “Three hundred thousand. Going . . .”

Avalon darted a glance at Handmade Loafers.

He was looking steadfastly straight ahead. His posture was indolent. But he had a tell: his face had gone white.

It might just be adrenaline. It might be tension. It might just be because he was English.

But Avalon definitively knew: he wasn’t going to bid higher than that.

Because he couldn’t.

“Going . . .”

Her fingers laced together. “Three ten.”

Had she really said that out loud?

Everyone was looking at her, so she must have.

There was a collective gasp, then someone coughed violently. It was safe to say a circling fly had been siphoned in.

Her words hung in the air, thrumming with insane bravado. Her will had hijacked her senses.

Handmade Loafers’s face was now as gray as his suit.

“Turns out we have three hundred ten thousand dollars.” The auctioneer sounded subdued yet gleeful. “Do I hear three fifteen?”

For a millisecond everything in the world seemed locked rigidly into place. Nothing moved. Not time. Not her lungs or her heart or her eyelids.

“Do I hear three fifteen?” Chuck Beasley coaxed, “Will the well-groomed gentleman sweep the prize away from the lady for three hundred fifteen thousand dollars, or will he suffer defeat today?”

Handmade Loafers was as motionless as the fountain. His lips were parted slightly. Avalon suspected he was struggling for breath.

“Going . . .”

Avalon’s own breath shuddered in and out, in and out. The blood rang in her ears.

“Going . . .”

She knotted her sweat-slick hands and pressed her lips together to prevent her silent, desperate prayers from escaping. She struggled not to close her eyes.

“SOLD! The House at Devil’s Leap sold to the Lady in the Shades!”

A great collective whoop went up.

Avalon had fainted once before in her life, and the moment preceding it had felt a lot like this one: the light-headedness, the black spots dancing before her eyes. So she didn’t trust herself to move just yet.

She did close her eyes briefly and indulged in an exhale so lengthy it ought to have deflated her two sizes.

“Congratulations on your exquisite taste and your triumph, my lady, and thank all of you for coming today. Why don’t we give her a hand? Come have a chat with me, if you would.” Chuck Beasley beckoned her forward.

She took a long, low, slow bow to acknowledge the applause. Her head swam on her way back up, another reminder that she’d slept maybe two hours last night. When she was upright she glanced around her as if she was seeing the world for the first time. Once again, everything had changed, and she’d done it. The sky seemed to have acquired a sort of rippling haze. She distantly knew this was because she was drunk on euphoria and bravado and fury and fatigue.

She moved, as though borne on a magic carpet, toward the beaming, beckoning auctioneer. She couldn’t feel her feet.

Handmade Loafers rotated slowly to watch. She was distantly aware that his expression suggested she might be a creature he’d never before seen, something cute but perhaps rabid. He was holding his cell phone a few inches from his ear, as if it was perhaps too hot to hold it closer. A peculiar high-pitched whine seemed to be emanating from it, as though it was picking up outer space signals, or an incoming fax, or perhaps preparing to explode.

And as she drew nearer to him, she nodded gently, and became aware that the whining sound was, in fact, a word: “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”