He already owned the card. Five dollars, sleeve-worn, played in a deck he built in tenth grade. The other one was the same illustration, the same pose, the same everything, with a thin gold line around the edge, and it was listed at four thousand eight hundred. He set a price alert. He checked the alert at work, in the bay, under a Corolla.

He paid it off in four installments and kept both in one binder, on facing pages, so people could see. Nobody could ever see. He would hand the binder over and watch the other person's eyes go back and forth between the two pages, waiting for the moment they understood, and then he would tell them, because they never did.