His duffel bag was still there.
She pawed through it, her mind sparking in a dozen panicked directions. No jewels. She yanked open her drawers, a burglar in her own home, searching desperately for evidence that he had not gone without her. And what if he had? She had half-expected it, hadn’t she?
The Mont box. She had shown it to him last night, every varnished layer and every babied hinge. Now she threw it open. She groped in the slip until her nails hit metal. They were there. He had hidden them away. Yes. Of course.
When Alls came in an hour later, Grace had shoved the earring posts into the bottom of a plain wax candle that she held upturned between her knees. She sat by the window, hunched over. She would have to buy a new headlamp, a new magnifier, since she was freelancing now. She would eventually need a portable soldering apparatus like the one at work. But today, she had only to open the prongs and close them around a pair of diamonds as big as unopened sunflower seeds. She allowed herself a sigh of relief when she heard him come in.
He wanted to know everything that had happened so far. She gave it to him in detail, keeping her eyes on her work. He seemed more interested in what she was doing than disappointed that she hadn’t sold the trillions, and that was how she knew. She felt like a plane touching down, finally on safe, hard ground.
She’d wrapped the aquamarines in a tissue. “We should save those,” she said. “They might come in handy sometime.”
He stood behind her as she clamped the last prongs closed.
“Hand me that cloth,” she said, pulling the earrings from the wax. The diamonds were nearly naked, barely held. Only a woman with more money than she could ever spend would wear something so valuable and so vulnerable.
“Put them on,” he said.
She wiggled the posts into her ears. He followed her into the bathroom, and they looked together at her reflection in the mirror.
“They don’t look real,” he said. “They’re too big to look real.”
“Diamonds only look real if you already look rich,” she said.
He laughed.
“We could still sell them today,” she said. “I can do it. Come with me. You’ll see.”
He shook his head. “These are probably easier to hide than the cash would be,” he said. “Safer to travel with.” He reached up and took her earlobe between his fingers, and she turned and pulled him closer.
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Alls watched her pack with curiosity: Another Grace was emerging. The cardigans would be left behind with Petit Trianon and her books. When she tucked her black boots along the side of the suitcase, he remembered them. He’d taken a picture that day in New York, he said, of Grace smiling in Union Square on their way to the auction. She’d never seen the photograph, but she could imagine: At eighteen, she’d looked corn-fed, a babe in the woods but for another girl’s dress and the stiletto boots and all that they implied. She had been so eager to change.
Now the boots suited her perfectly.
At dusk, they stepped off the bus at Gallieni. He had their bags, his small duffel and her larger rolling suitcase. They crossed the street to where the tour buses were idling, sweaty travelers embarking and disembarking.
“Tickets?” the stubbly driver asked, looking at his clipboard.
“We need to buy them now,” Alls said, handing the driver the money.
He waved them onto the bus, and they turned to mount the metal stairs.
“No, no!” the man called after her, and Grace whipped around in the sudden grip of alarm.
“You have to put your big bag down here,” he said, pointing under the bus. “Only small bags up there.” He held out his hand, ready to assist her.
She looked to Alls, but he was already on the bus. Inside her suitcase were the Mont Box and all the secrets it held, her tools, precious metals, and a fortune in gemstones.
Grace smiled and let the driver take the handle. “Thank you,” she said.
Alls had found them two seats together near the back. In front of them, a young mother nursed a fretful infant. Three backpackers, separated by four rows of people, debated what they’d heard about the Madrid hostels. Alls took her hand as if they were any young couple traveling Europe on a shoestring, looking out the grimy windows, wondering at the smells of other people’s food. The driver climbed into his seat, and the bus lurched away from the curb, where a small crowd of strangers waved them good-bye.
Epilogue
Grace turned twenty-five outside Brussels, at the wedding reception of a rich Belgian girl she’d befriended at a daytime watercolor class six months before. Three hundred people were now crowded onto the brick terrace at the girl’s parents’ house, and when the bride’s father, silver-haired and American, raised his flute to toast the happiness of his only daughter, Alls raised his glass an extra centimeter for Grace. They would celebrate her birthday later, alone. The crowd applauded the young couple and then began to spread across the garden in clusters, waiters streaming between them with platters of canapés. Alls set his champagne flute on a white-dressed table and disappeared inside to find a bathroom. Grace plucked a tartlet from a passing tray.
“Galette de pigeon,” the waiter said.
When Alls came out of the house thirty minutes later, he found Grace chatting about Byzantine art with someone’s uncle, who laughed uproariously at her colorful jokes about Justinian. Grace fed Alls a bite of her lobster salad and wiped the sauce from the corner of his mouth with her pinkie, and l’oncle sidled away, beckoned by his wife to talk to an older couple. Alls had finished inside, and Grace could tell from his languid gestures and the softness of his forearm around her waist that his job had been an easy one, but they would have to stay through dinner anyway, mostly to charm but also to commit small, strategic offenses that would travel back to the bride and her family tomorrow and over the next weeks: a dirty joke shared sotto voce during the mother’s tearful toast, an ungenerous comparison of the groom to his brother, some uncovered yawning and unladylike postures. They had to kill any friendships to ensure an easy exit from the lives of their marks. She’d long since given up on others’ kind opinions of her; she had to shed these as easily as she shed her names. To offend someone swiftly, efficiently, even, as you left forever was kinder by far than to slowly withdraw, to confuse and disappoint. You didn’t want them to miss you. Anger was simple, self-sustaining as a cactus. You couldn’t look too closely at it, lest the spines get you in the eye.
The people they had left behind were lucky to be done with them. Grace and Alls didn’t have the luxury of forgetting anyone. Always, she listened for the ticking. Only Jacqueline had vanished without leaving a trace. Greg was selling time-shares in Florida. Riley had not gone back to jail after all, but to a private psychiatric facility for one year instead. When he was released, he and Colin opened an ice cream shop, just as he’d always wanted. Grace hoped he was happy. She chose to believe that he was.
But he still hadn’t divorced her. He wouldn’t need her consent if he couldn’t find her, and she’d long since cut her last tie to Garland, just an e-mail address after all. The Tennessee courts would ask Riley only to make the appropriate gestures, the “good faith effort”: calling old numbers, asking the post office for a forwarding address. Then the Record would run a legal notice, divorce by publication. But the Record had run no such thing.
She didn’t know why, and when the question woke her up at night, she would go into the bathroom, face the mirror, and turn the lights out, a simple homemade spell for believing she had disappeared.
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