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mahogany?
    Maybe it was because Nicole seemed to have thrown in her hand and was already talking to Elizabeth about people they knew in common in Maryland, but I blurted out, “Thirty-seven-million-dollar guarantee and a four-percent commission. Anything we make over thirty-seven, we keep. That’s the best offer I can give you and it’s an extremely good one.”
    Elizabeth looked at me startled, her glassy green eyes not quite registering what I had just said.
    â€œI’ll also waive all fees. The insurance fee, the illustration fee. Everything. You and I both know David won’t put that offer on the table even if you say we did. I shouldn’t be putting that offer out. But I am. You’ll lead the January sales. It’s a very fast turnaround to get your estate ready by January but it seems very important to you—”
    â€œIt’s a deal breaker,” Elizabeth interrupted me.
    â€œRight, we will have everything ready for January, then. Absolutely guaranteed.”
    Nicole was doing the math in her head as she looked at me looking at Elizabeth. She had clearly figured out how many million I had overpromised by and started to turn very pale and shook her head no at me. I ignored her and repeated the numbers.
    An hour later, as I knew she would, Elizabeth signed our offer.

CHAPTER 3
    W hen Alex didn’t return my calls for five days I started to worry. We had always been able to go days, sometimes weeks, without speaking to each other, but we never ignored each other’s big life moments. This was the second time in twenty-two days that he had taken my happiness and shredded it with his silence.
    He finally called me during the last week of September, but didn’t apologize for the time lapse, for ignoring me, or for yet again letting me down when I needed support. He talked to me the way he’d always talked to me and we drifted back to laughing about summers in high school. When everyone we boarded with headed home and we were left to be wild teenagers in Newport. So I forgave him. I wanted familiarity and Alex always delivered that. I didn’t have time to think about why I tolerated the rest of him because I, along with Nicole, Louise, and Erik Wagner, deputy chairman of Christie’s America, had three months to get ready for the January sales.
    My job became my everything. I stopped going out. I ate lunch and dinner at my desk. I talked to Jane Dalby only occasionally and very late at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep. I sent the occasional text to my parents that said, “I’m alive, not to worry.” The rest of the time, I was at work. It was a very cold fall, even for someone used to six months of cold, and my walk to and from the subway became the only time I spent outside. The leaves turned from beautiful to brown, the number of tourists packed into Rockefeller Center thinned out a little before the holiday storm, and my world shrank to my apartment, my office, the deli where I bought coffee, and the occasional inside of a cab when I was too tired or too cold to wait for a train.
    Elizabeth’s estate, or the estate of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson as it was called in the catalogue and in the press, was poised to bring in 70 percent of the January sale’s revenue.
    â€œI thought as much,” said Elizabeth when I called to tell her at 9 A.M. sharp on the first Monday in December.
    â€œI did, too,” I replied. After all the red tape had been peeled away, Elizabeth had told me more about her friendship with my grandmother. They’d spent time on a museum committee together and had formed a bond that Elizabeth seemed to regret losing.
    â€œShe was a fair bit older than me, you know,” she said as we changed topics from the upcoming auction to the familiar thread that linked us together. “But she was the kind of woman everybody wanted to know. She’d had a child just a few years before.”
    â€œMy father,” I