Turn 8 of 10

Read your bid card — all of it

You step past Tamsin into the parlor. The light in here is different — amber, late-afternoon, the kind of light that makes everything it touches look like a memory of itself. The table holds the bid cards in their gold borders, fanned out like tarot, and the face-down one sits at the front, waiting with the patience of something that has always been waiting. Your name is already on it. You know this before you turn it over the way you know the tote strap belongs on your shoulder, the way you know the vanilla scent is just a candle, the way you know a hundred small things you didn't decide to know.

Tamsin watches from the doorway. You feel her eyes on your hands as you reach for the card. The stock is heavy, cream-colored, the border a looping gold script that matches the hallway lettering. You flip it over.

*Ivy Calderon is the kind of girl who brings people together.*

*She has a natural gift for connection — warm, approachable, endlessly social. She makes every room she enters feel more alive simply by being in it. Friends gravitate toward her warmth, and she toward them, because Ivy understands that the best version of yourself is the one other people can see. She doesn't need to stand apart. She doesn't want to. She is happiest in the center of the group, glowing, reflecting, belonging.*

*Spring palette. Social chair track. The house sees her. The house is proud.*

You read it twice. The second time is worse, because the second time you can feel the pull of it — not as a command, not as a cage, but as a mirror. It shows you a version of yourself that is undeniably attractive: liked, luminous, the girl at the center. The girl who doesn't need to calculate because she's already arrived. It's flattering. It's also wrong, the way a very good portrait is wrong — it captures something true and erases the thing that's actually you. The calculation. The distance. The part of you that came here to observe and leave, not to be observed and stay.

You look up. Tamsin is still in the doorway, her hand on the frame, and something in her face shifts when she sees your expression — not hope, exactly, but the raw edge of it, the part that hasn't been smoothed down yet.

"It sounds nice, doesn't it?" she says. Her voice is barely there.

"That's how it starts."