“You made a promise, and I won’t work here anymore if—”
“Nobody’s making you work for me.”
When Amaury came out, Grace and Hanna dropped their eyes, their tools suddenly clacking. He took his jacket from his station and left.
Grace clanked the handle of her pliers loudly on the edge of the table. She wished she hadn’t overheard.
15
On Monday, Grace was winding the centerpiece’s tree trunks with bronze-beaded wires, spiraling from the base to the fine branches. Applying these beaded wires was the easiest thing they’d done to the centerpiece since cleaning, and Grace didn’t want to rush. Jacqueline had left her alone after she’d finished the bracelet, and Grace wished she could work quietly on the centerpiece with Hanna. She was proud of her work: Her peaches, now bound to the branches, looked soft and fragrant, though they were neither, and her acorns were so small and precise that no one would even see them until they looked very, very closely.
She’d also done quite good work on the ruby and diamond bracelet, but she didn’t want to think about that.
Hanna was clipping serrations along the edges of her silk leaves with minute scissors, the sharp blades short as a pencil tip, when Grace asked her what Nina had lied about.
Her brow furrowed, but she did not ask Grace to clarify.
“Real liars don’t lie about anything,” Hanna said. “They just lie. ‘About’ is a word liars use to justify their lying, to make it seem like a localized problem.”
“You’ve made quite a study,” Grace said, trying to sound light and wry.
“But I still don’t know,” Hanna said. “And that upsets me. With a liar, you can never know the whole truth, ever. You can’t ever be sure that this version is the real version. There is no end, no bottom. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing was a hoax.”
“The whole thing?”
“Our whole affair. I’m not sure she was even conscious of lying, or if lying had become so much of her nature that she lied without thinking. So, yes. If I was just another object for her lying.”
“And if you were in on it,” Grace said, standing to get closer to the tips of the trees. “Lying to yourself, or wanting to believe too much.”
She had meant to commiserate, to empathize, but Hanna was too quiet. Grace looked up to see Hanna’s eyes tightly screwed onto her leaves. Bits of fabric small as dust floated down into her lap.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Nobody wants to be lied to.”
“Of course not,” Grace said apologetically. “Not consciously. It’s just that you know the person wants something that isn’t—”
“Yes,” Hanna said. “You lie because you know, when asked the question, that there’s a good answer and a bad one.”
“You want to give the good one,” Grace said. “To be good. And they want you to, too.”
Grace had never talked like this with anyone. She looked down at the wastebasket and saw in its lid Hanna’s reflection. She had leaned back from the table and turned her head toward the stairs and Jacqueline’s door. Grace heard it open.
Jacqueline strode over with two jewelry boxes. “Hello, ladies,” she said. “How’s the gossip?”
Grace smiled weakly. “Fine.”
Jacqueline sucked her teeth. “Amaury’s going to come back to locked doors. That man.” She laid a cool hand on Grace’s bare shoulder, her jasmine perfume drifting forward. “Not that we need him anymore, right, Julie?”
She opened the first jewelry box. Inside was a watch, a jeweled pink monstrosity.
“Just the clasp needs fixing. I have an appointment, but I’ll be back to close.”
“There is no clasp,” Grace protested.
“Relax,” Jacqueline said. “It’s right there.” She split apart the jewelry cushion and dug out a jeweled crescent, a clasp in the shape of a single paisley. “The missing stones are in there too, but you can pull them out with tweezers. I can’t get in there with my fat fingers.”
It didn’t even make sense for a watch to be in a cushioned box like that. “I’m not sure I can fix this,” Grace said.
“I am,” Jacqueline said.
? ? ?
The watch was the sort of bauble that a Disney princess would wear if brought to life. Platinum; candy-pink crocodile strap; diamonds surrounding a pink teardrop face. Grace found a comparable watch for sale at a shop in Connecticut for ninety-five thousand dollars.
The clasp had been torn from the band, as though the watch had been ripped from its owner’s wrist, but the stones missing from the clasp would have come loose gradually. There were nine diamonds, each no larger than a mustard seed, and only eight sockets.
Grace was furious at this, that Jacqueline had been too sloppy to even count, to make it look right for her. There was no question that Jacqueline was stealing stones. Was there a partner somewhere, a jeweler who took in pieces for cleaning and returned them to owners sparkling with fakes? Or were these lifted right out of dressers and drawers?
“How come she doesn’t ask you?” Grace lamented.
“She did once, but I refused. It’s such a slippery slope for me, back to my old habits. I can’t mess around even a little. I don’t work on anything that doesn’t have good papers.”
“What? I’ve never seen any papers. What do you do when there are no papers?”
“I either get them myself, or get something via e-mail. If I can’t, I tell Jacqueline I won’t work on it without papers, and then she finds someone else.”
“Me.”
“Sometimes.”
“How could you? And not tell me?”
“Julie, I thought you didn’t mind. You’ve never asked about papers.”
“I didn’t know I could.” Grace’s mouth had gone dry.
“I thought that was why you were here, why she picked you. To do the jobs that are a little . . .” Hanna wiggled her fingers.
“And you never said anything. All this time.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to talk about it,” Hanna said. “It’s not the kind of thing people say. I’m sorry, I had no idea you were so—”
“Was there even an Angeline?” Grace asked, disgusted.
“Yes,” Hanna said. “She left.”
“Does Amaury do it?”
“He used to,” Hanna said. “Not that they ever spoke of it in front of me, but it’s obvious enough. But he got spooked or something. He only does clocks and watches now.”
“What happened? What scared him?”
“Nothing much. We’re all here, aren’t we? Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it. He has a kid. He has to be cautious.”
“I thought he lived alone.”
“His son lives with his mother, I think in Montreuil. In his teens by now.”
Amaury had been here since before Jacqueline took over for her father. Grace had only been here two years. Trusting her must have been a last resort.
“These aren’t just little snatches from regular commissions,” Grace said. “This is a hundred-thousand-dollar watch.”
“So tell her no.”
“If there’s no one here under me, she’ll probably fire me if I don’t.”
“There’s no one here under you.”
Grace knew she was at the very bottom of any ladder. Jacqueline probably wouldn’t dare switch out the stones herself, even if she could. She wouldn’t want to dirty her hands. So she gave Grace the materials, the instructions, and a smile.
Her? Jacqueline could say to the hypothetical interrogators who bothered Grace’s imagination. This girl? American. Hired her off the street. She betrayed me—a thief!
Rage spread from Grace’s fingertips up to her ears. She was disgusted that she could still be so naive.
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