So much of her life since she had left Garland, even the first time, had been a series of tragic errors. She couldn’t imagine that she’d gotten away with it. She didn’t feel as though she had gotten away with anything—more like she’d gotten away without.
Grace was painting the hooves of one of Hanna’s sheep when Jacqueline called her in. Usually her boss came out of her office when she wanted something, looking over everyone’s work as she talked. Grace stood up, but her left leg had fallen asleep and she started to tumble. Hanna shrieked, high-pitched as a scared rabbit, and Grace grabbed the corner of the table to right herself. Amaury had leaned over to cover his workings with his arms, like a hen protecting a brood of chicks. His table was eight feet away.
“Pardon,” Grace said.
She hobbled into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline shut the door.
“Asseyez-vous,” she said. “I have something new for you.”
“What about the centerpiece?”
“Hanna will be working on it for weeks,” Jacqueline said. “In the meantime, we have to get paid.” She unlocked her desk drawer and pulled out a velvet jewelry box. “Hold this,” she said, handing Grace a giant cocktail ring set with brightly colored jewels. Jacqueline pushed her finger into the jewelry box’s crease, peering into it. She turned the box over and shook it into her lap. Two pearls bounced across her skirt.
“The pearls fell out,” she said, placing them in Grace’s palm.
“I don’t know what to do with jewelry,” Grace said. “I don’t know anything about jewelry.”
“Just pretend it’s a jewelry box instead of the jewelry, okay? You’ve done pearl setting before. The minaudière, remember?”
“But that was costume,” Grace said.
“This is costume.”
“I don’t think it is,” Grace said, rubbing the thick gold band with her thumb.
“It might as well be. Pearls, peridot. Nothing so very precious. The centerpiece is worth five times what this ring is worth.”
“The centerpiece? How much? Nine, ten thousand euros?”
“More like fifteen, even as partial reproduction. Nothing like it, and the collector’s a little crazy. So who can say?”
? ? ?
The green center stone was a huge oval cabochon, rounded as an eyeball. Jacqueline had said semiprecious, but Grace was sure she was looking at an emerald, flanked by stacks of amethyst baguettes. The ring looked like formalwear for a Mardi Gras parade, like the fantasy jewelry of a six-year-old who wanted to be a princess. At the top and bottom of the emerald were empty sockets where the pearls were to go.
“Amaury, do you have any pearl cement remover?” Grace waggled her finger, weighed down by the heavy ring. “I need to clean this up a bit.”
Amaury cocked his head toward the shelf behind him, which held all manner of solvents and cements that Hanna and Grace seldom required. Amaury more often dealt with jewels, working on watches, and Grace wondered why Jacqueline hadn’t asked him to do the ring.
Grace had the ring fixed in fifteen minutes. Dissolving the old glue was as simple as removing polish from a fingernail, and then she dabbed a little cement into each setting with a toothpick and pushed the pearls in. Three thousand euros, held together with glue.
When she gave the ring back to Jacqueline, her boss ran her fingers over the pearls and around them, feeling for any roughness. She squinted at the ring under her desk lamp. “Good,” she said.
Then she took a brown paper sack from her purse and upended it into her palm. Out tumbled a jeweled bangle, a fat gold tube striped with red and white stones. “Same with this bracelet,” Jacqueline said. “Some of the stones have come loose from their settings. It’s an older piece.” The gold was discolored and the remaining stones were dirty. Jacqueline held the bracelet out to Grace, who hesitated.
“Did you want me to ask Amaury? He’s busier than you are right now—”
“No,” Grace said quickly. “I’ll do it.”
Jacqueline handed Grace a small envelope. She could feel the stones through the paper. She knew that when she opened the bag, the stones inside it would be bright and clean.
At her desk, Grace looked closely at the gem settings. The lights buzzed overhead, and she turned on her brightest lamp. She picked at the crooked metal prongs that had given up their diamonds and rubies. Grace had been so eager to prove herself to Jacqueline, and this was what she’d done it for? She hadn’t stolen anything in years, not even a pack of gum. She looked at Hanna’s little sheep and their half-painted hooves with longing.
? ? ?
Grace and Hanna communicated in single words—Salad? Omelet?—until they were sitting next to each other on a park bench, staring together at a bird foraging from the rim of a garbage can.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s that,” Hanna said when Grace told her about the jewelry. “She used to take in jewelry work from time to time. There hasn’t been any jewelry since you’ve been here?”
“No, just watches,” Grace said. “Amaury’s things.”
“She used to have a jewelry person here. Angeline. She left when her eyesight got too bad, and I guess that was the end of the jewelry. But I’m sure you’ll be very good—you do all the microscopic work very well. You should get reading glasses, though. You’ll ruin your eyes.”
“It’s just bizarre for something so expensive to be in a paper bag like that.”
“You know as well as I do that people don’t always take very good care of their things.”
Grace nodded.
“I mean, it could be,” Hanna said. “Stolen, I mean. We wouldn’t know. Would you really mind if it was?”
“Of course I would.”
“Funny that this would suddenly bother you,” Hanna said. “You know she’s not running a spotless operation.”
“No one in antiques is,” Grace said. “But there’s a line. I’ll do whatever I’m told as long as I can reasonably believe that it’s okay.”
“Reasonably believe? That’s not belief; it’s the opposite.”
“Hanna, we don’t know what happens outside the studio,” Grace said.
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
Grace sat in doubtful silence, picking at her salad. She thought now about Antonia and Nina and wondered if they were the same person or if these names, unusual sounding to her, were as common in Denmark as Madison and Emma were in Tennessee. So often she’d felt on the edge of knowing something, and as many times as she had leaped over that edge she had scrambled backward, covering her eyes. She didn’t want to know about the jewelry but it was too late. She wanted to ask about Nina and Antonia, but Hanna’s temperament seemed to forbid it.
Then Hanna asked her why she had cheated on her husband in the first place. Whatever limits she felt, she clearly ignored.
“The same reason anybody does,” she said. “I was lonely and disappointed.”
“Or bored and entitled.”
“Maybe bored,” Grace agreed.
“People always say the other person didn’t mean anything.”
“No, he meant a great deal to me,” Grace said. “I loved him horribly, if you can say that. Like I was sick with him. I knew I’d made the right choice, marrying my husband, and some evil part of me was trying to ruin everything, and she needed to be silenced.” She grimaced. “I sound like I’m describing a psychopath.”
“Two selves.”
“Everyone has them, I think.”
“Public and private.”
“Right and wrong.”
“I find it so strange that you were married. You’re such a remote person. I can’t imagine you as a passionate teenager.”
Grace could hardly imagine herself as a passionate teenager. Until that night with Alls, she had never been at a loss to explain, to herself, her own decisions. She had never confused self-interest with self-indulgence. She knew the difference.
? ? ?
When they came back from lunch, Amaury was in Jacqueline’s office. They could hear him. Hanna put her finger to her lips, and Grace tiptoed back to her table.
“Whose is it?” Amaury demanded.
“Go back to your desk,” Jacqueline said. “Stop asking me questions if you don’t like the answers.”