"I see," she said.
"We have some beautiful pieces in a range that might be more comfortable," Grant went on, already turning toward another case. "This line here, for example..."
"I'd like to look at it anyway," Vivian said. "If that's all right."
He paused. She saw him weigh it. Then he smiled, the brochure smile, and said, "Of course," and unlocked the case.
She would think about this moment many times afterward. She would think about the fact that he did not have to do it. He could have steered her somewhere else, or made an excuse, or simply let her look through the glass. He chose to take it out. He lifted it from its velvet form with both hands, carefully, the way you lift something alive, and laid it on a black velvet tray on top of the counter between them, and turned the tray toward her.
"Go ahead," Grant said. "You can pick it up if you'd like. The clasp is a box clasp with a safety. I can help you put it on, if you want to see it in the mirror."
Vivian looked at it on the tray. Up close it was even more beautiful. She could see now that each diamond was a slightly different size, that the setting had been made by hand, that there were tiny engraved leaves on the platinum between the stones, worn soft by nearly a hundred years of somebody's skin. She thought of the woman who had worn it first, in 1928, and of all the women who had worn it since, and she wondered whether any of them had ever looked like her.
She reached out and touched it. Just one finger, on the largest stone at the front. It was cool and hard and smooth.
"Raymond," she said softly, not quite meaning to say it out loud. "Look at this."
Grant's phone buzzed in his breast pocket. He glanced at the screen, and his face changed, tightened.
"Excuse me one moment," he said. "I'm so sorry. I have to take this. Please, take your time." And he stepped away, three or four paces, toward the end of the counter, turning his back to her, his phone pressed to his ear.
Vivian stood alone at the case with the necklace on the black velvet tray in front of her. She did not pick it up. She did not want to, not without him there; it felt like something you should not do alone, like opening someone else's mail. She only looked at it, and let herself imagine, for one minute, what Raymond's face would have looked like if he had been standing beside her.
Behind her, and above her, on the mezzanine, a woman in a gray suit stood at the railing with a tablet in her hand and watched.
The call was from Bradley Sutton, the regional vice president, and Grant Mercer had known it would come sooner or later from the moment he woke up that morning.
"Grant. Got a minute?"
"I'm with a client, Brad. Can I call you back in ten?"