GRANT. He looked at her, and she watched him do it: the quick professional sweep, top to bottom, the dress, the shoes, the purse, her face. She had watched people do it for sixty-one years. She knew what it meant when the sweep ended in a smile and what it meant when it ended somewhere else.
His ended in a smile. A small one.
"Good morning," Grant said. "Welcome to Whitcomb and Hale. Is there something I can help you find today?"
"Good morning," said Vivian. "I'd like to look at necklaces. Diamond necklaces."
"Of course." The smile did not change, but something in his posture did, a fractional settling, like a man resigning himself to a short conversation. "Were you thinking of a pendant? We have some lovely pieces in our Signature collection, starting around twelve hundred."
"I was thinking of something more than a pendant."
"Ah." He came around the end of the case. "Is this a gift?"
"In a manner of speaking," Vivian said. "My husband's buying it for me."
Grant glanced past her toward the door, as if expecting a husband to appear there. When none did, he turned back to her with a slightly brighter smile, the smile of a man who has recalculated the odds.
"Wonderful. Will he be joining us?"
"He passed last year."
The smile faltered for half a second, and she saw something real cross his face, a flicker of genuine embarrassment, and she liked him a little for it.
"I'm so sorry," he said, and seemed to mean it. "May I ask your name?"
"Vivian Reed."
"Mrs. Reed. Please. Come this way."
He led her to a case near the center of the floor. Inside, on dove-gray velvet, lay perhaps a dozen necklaces, and Vivian, who had told herself she would be sensible, who had told herself she would look and think and go home and sleep on it, felt her breath catch in her chest like a girl's.
They were not like anything she had seen in the windows. The windows had big flashy things, statement pieces, the kind of necklace you saw on red carpets. These were quieter. A single line of small round diamonds set in white gold, each one catching the light and throwing it back in a hundred colors. A delicate chain with a pear-shaped stone at the center, no bigger than a fingernail. And in the center of the case, on its own small velvet form, a necklace that made her stop breathing altogether: a slender strand of graduated diamonds, small at the clasp and growing slowly larger toward the front, each one set in a tiny claw of platinum, so that when the light from the case hit them they seemed to move, like water, like the lake on a summer morning.
"That one," Vivian said, before she could stop herself.
Grant followed her gaze. Something she could not quite read moved behind his eyes.
"That's an estate piece," he said. "Art Deco, around 1928. It's one of the finest things we have on the floor right now. It's priced at sixty-four thousand."
He said the number gently, the way you might tell a child that the puppy in the window was not for sale. Vivian, who had eleven thousand four hundred dollars in her purse, felt her face go warm.