"I don't need diamonds."
"That's not the point and you know it. That's never been the point. He wanted to give you something. Let him."
It took her three more months to go. She told herself it was because she was busy, which was true; retirement had turned out to be a great deal busier than anyone had warned her. She tutored on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the library in Bronzeville. She sat on the board of a scholarship fund. She had four grandchildren and a garden and a church that had discovered, the moment she retired, that she was available for every committee. But the real reason was simpler, and she knew it. She had lived in Chicago for sixty-one years, and she knew exactly what it felt like to walk into one of those fancy places on Michigan Avenue as a Black woman and have nobody hand you anything at all.
She went on a Thursday in late June, a bright hot morning, the lake glittering at the end of every east-west street. She wore her good navy dress, the one from Denise's wedding, and the pearl earrings Raymond had given her for their twenty-fifth anniversary, and comfortable shoes, because she was sixty-one and she was not a fool. She put the envelope in her purse, in the zippered inside pocket, and she rode the Green Line downtown and walked the rest of the way.
Whitcomb and Hale had been on the Magnificent Mile since 1911. It was the kind of store that did not have a sign so much as an inscription, carved into the limestone over the door in small elegant capitals, and a doorman in a gray suit who opened the heavy glass door for you before you had quite reached it. Vivian had walked past it a thousand times in her life. Raymond had always slowed down a little when they passed, and squeezed her hand, and said, "Someday."
She took a breath, and went in.
Inside it was cool and quiet and smelled faintly of lilies. The floor was pale marble. The display cases were long and low and lit from within, so that everything inside them seemed to float on its own small cloud of light. There was a wide curving staircase at the back that led up to a mezzanine where, she would learn later, the offices and the private viewing rooms were. Soft piano music came from somewhere she could not see. Two or three other customers moved slowly between the cases, and four or five salespeople in dark suits stood behind them, very still, like herons in a pond.
One of them looked up when she came in. He was young, or young to her, somewhere in his thirties, tall and well made, with sandy hair cut short and a beautiful charcoal suit and the kind of face that belonged on a brochure for a golf resort. His name tag said