I might come back tomorrow, but it’s not worth waiting to see if someone else will have snapped up the bargains that now belong to me. Sliding into the front seat, I’m sweating. The September sun is hot today through the leaves that have begun drifting down from the trees, even though they’re mostly still green.

The A/C puffs coolish air into my face as I tap out a search on my phone to bring up one of the resale sites I belong to. A purse similar to the one I just bought sold last week for eighty dollars. A handbag and wallet set in worse shape than the ones I now own sold two weeks ago for close to a hundred. If I buff out the scratches and put these up as a set, sell the belt separately, I’ll make back what I spent, plus a possible hundred or so more.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to flip this stuff, which will justify having bought it in the first place. I don’t need another handbag, no matter how nice it is. The belt isn’t even my size. And what good is a wallet if you don’t have any money for it to hold?

The cardboard box is soft with age as I take off the lid and pull out the wallet. I admire the reddish leather. The craftsmanship. Vintage items are so much better-made than new things. I peek inside, imagining my license in the clear plastic slot. A small crow of laughter slips out of me.

Inside the wallet is a hundred dollar bill.

My grandma once told me that you never gift someone a purse or a wallet without putting some money inside it. To do so would be bad luck. Well, someone had clearly felt the same way, but the bad luck was for whoever received this wallet and didn’t bother to look inside it.

I spent twenty and got back a hundred. It’s a sign, isn’t it? Okay, so I’ll sell the purse and the belt, but this wallet was meant to be mine.

I make a quick stop at my storage unit to tuck away the purse and belt. I nestle them in a bin next to the other Etienne Aigner pieces I’ve collected, each wrapped carefully in tissue paper. I take my cards and the photo of Eli out of my current wallet, a nice enough Coach piece that doesn’t make my heart as happy as this new one. I put the cards in the one I just bought and the Coach wallet away in its own bin.

The key to keeping Ken from finding out how much money I spend is to never let him see more or new items in my closet. He has brand-name blindness; designers mean nothing to him. So long as there are only ever four or five pairs of shoes, a couple of purses, half a closet rack full of hangers, he never notices if I’m switching out one piece for another.