Vivian looked at her for a long time. Then she came and sat down in the chair across the table, and set her purse in her lap, and folded her hands on top of it.
"What happens to him?" she asked.
"That's my decision, and I'll make it today. I'm not going to ask you to make it for me. But I'll tell you this. He won't be on my floor again."
Vivian nodded slowly. She did not look pleased. She looked tired.
"I want you to know something too," she said. "I don't want a gift card. I don't want a discount. I don't want one of those letters from corporate with the nice paper. I know what those are. I've written them myself, on behalf of the Chicago Public Schools, and I never believed a word in them either."
"I understand."
"I came here to buy a necklace with my husband's money. He saved it in an envelope for thirty-one years. He wrote me a note that said I deserved to walk into one of these places and have somebody hand me something beautiful." Her voice did not shake, but something underneath it did. "And somebody did. He handed me the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. And then he took it away and called me a thief."
Ruth closed her eyes.
"I won't be buying anything today," Vivian said. She stood up. "Thank you for showing me your film, Ms. Kessler. And thank you for what you told me. I believe you meant it." She paused at the door. "That little girl in the yellow dress. I hope somebody, someday, told her she belonged anywhere she wanted to go."
And she went out.
Ruth sat alone in the small room for a long time with the frozen image on the tablet in front of her, a woman in a navy dress standing perfectly still beside a necklace she had not touched, and the green river moving slowly past the window, and she did not get up until Marcus knocked softly on the door and said Grant was waiting.
Vivian walked out through the heavy glass door, which the doorman opened for her without a word, and went half a block north and sat down on a bench beside a planter full of red geraniums, and took out her phone, and found that her hands were shaking too badly to dial.
So she just sat there. The traffic went by on Michigan Avenue. A tour bus. Tourists with shopping bags. The lake glittered at the end of the street. She held her purse in her lap with Raymond's envelope still zipped into the inside pocket, untouched, eleven thousand four hundred dollars of thirty-one years, and after a while she said, out loud, to nobody, "Well, Ray. I went."