"Then verify it," she said. Her voice had changed now, gone cooler and very precise. "I'll wait."
"I'd also like to ask you to open your bag."
There it was. He heard himself say it, and some small part of his mind, the part that had been raised by a woman who cleaned houses in Kokomo and once came home in tears because a client had accused her of stealing a ring that turned up a week later in the client's own coat pocket, that part of him said, very clearly, Grant, stop. And the rest of him did not listen.
The store had gone quiet. Grant was aware of it the way you are aware of weather. An older couple two cases down had stopped talking. A young woman with a stroller near the door had turned her head. Behind the next counter, his colleague Priya was staring at him with an expression of frank horror.
Vivian Reed looked at him for a long moment.
"No," she said.
"Ma'am..."
"No. I will not open my bag. I have not taken anything from you. You handed me that necklace, young man. You took it out of the case, and you laid it in front of me, and you told me I could pick it up. And then you turned your back and took a phone call, and I stood here and I touched one stone with one finger, and now you're going to tell me I'm a thief in front of all these people." Her voice did not rise. That was the terrible thing. It did not rise at all. "You may verify your necklace. You may call whoever you like. But I am not going to open my purse for you like a child turning out her pockets in the principal's office. I spent nineteen years as the principal. I know how that room works."
Grant's face was hot. He could feel it. He was aware, distantly, that he was doing something he would not be able to undo, and he was aware that he could not seem to stop.
"Then I'll have to ask security to come over," he said.
"Do that," said Vivian Reed.
He lifted his hand and signaled toward the door, where Marcus Bell, the store's daytime security officer, stood in his gray suit beside the doorman. Marcus was fifty-two, a retired Chicago police sergeant, broad-shouldered and gray at the temples, who had worked at Whitcomb and Hale for seven years and in all that time had never once raised his voice. He came across the marble floor slowly. When he reached the counter he looked at Grant, and then at the woman in the navy dress, and something passed over his face that Grant did not understand until much later.
Marcus Bell was Black. He had been a Black police officer in Chicago for twenty-three years, and he had stood in rooms like this one before, on both sides of the counter.
"What's the situation, Grant?" he asked quietly.