"This'll take two." Sutton's voice was flat and pleasant, the voice of a man who had already decided something. "I'm looking at the second-quarter numbers. Chicago's down eighteen percent. You're down twenty-two. And I've still got the November loss sitting on my desk like a dead fish. Corporate's asking me questions I don't have answers to."
Grant turned a little further away from the counter and lowered his voice. "The November thing wasn't..."
"I know what it wasn't. I read your statement. I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it was your case, and your client, and forty-one thousand dollars walked out the door on your shift, and the insurance company is still fighting us on it. You're on a final, Grant. I just want to make sure you understand what that means. Another loss, another incident, anything at all, and I can't protect you. Okay?"
"I understand."
"Good man. Go sell something." And Sutton hung up.
Grant stood with the phone against his ear for a second longer than he needed to, staring at the marble floor.
He was thirty-four years old. He had been at Whitcomb and Hale for eight years, and for six of them he had been the best salesman on the floor. He was good at it. He had a gift for it, his first manager had told him: for reading what people wanted before they knew it themselves, for making a three-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase feel like the most natural thing in the world. He had grown up in Kokomo, Indiana, the son of a man who sold used cars and a woman who cleaned other people's houses, and he had come to Chicago at twenty-two with one good suit and a gift for talking, and he had built a life out of that gift. A condo in River North with a mortgage he could barely carry. A leased Audi. An ex-wife who had told him, on her way out the door two years ago, that he had turned into somebody who measured everything in commission.
And then November.
He thought about November every day. He thought about it in the shower and on the train and at three in the morning staring at his bedroom ceiling. A woman had come in on a Tuesday afternoon, about fifty, beautifully dressed, blond hair in a perfect chignon, a Hermès bag over her arm and a story about her daughter's engagement. She had been charming. She had been funny. She had asked to see a sapphire and diamond bracelet, and then another, and then a third, and somewhere in the middle of the third one she had asked him a question about the clasp that made him turn and reach for a loupe, and when he turned back, everything had looked exactly the same. She had thanked him, and said she would bring her husband back on Saturday, and left.
It was two days before anyone noticed that the bracelet in the case was a fake. A very good fake. Glass and rhodium-plated silver, made to the exact measurements of the real one, swapped in the four seconds his back had been turned.