Chapter 1
Ialready knew. Before I even heard the words, I understood what was going to come out of her mouth next.
“I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said. She fidgeted with the loupe she’d just been using, and she really did look pained.
I waited. And after a second, she continued.
“As you suspected, this stone is not genuine.”
“Not genuine,” I repeated, and she nodded slowly.
“It’s what we call a diamond simulant.” She explained about the machine she’d used to test it, the difference in sparkle and optic character, and…
And I wasn’t really listening. I stared at the ring she held, at the huge, round diamond—no, not a diamond. That wasn’t real.
“Are they all, um, spurious?” I asked the jeweler. “Simulant” and “spurious” sounded so much better than “pieces of phony garbage.” I pointed to the multitude of clear, sparkling gems that surrounded the big one in the middle. “All of them?”
“So, the center stone definitely is,” she agreed. “I tested a few of the larger side stones and yes, they’re also imitation gems.”
“Imitation gems,” I repeated. It was another phrase that sounded better than “counterfeit crud.”
“They used to call them paste or Strass. Um, I don’t want to overstep, but your earrings…” She raised a hesitant hand to point to the studs I wore. “I could also look at those for you.”
I walked out onto the sidewalk only a little while later, but it felt like the whole world had shifted as I’d been inside the store. Everything was slanted and confused, but logically I knew that I was the only one who’d been thrown out of whack by what had just happened. My ring consisted of diamond simulants and my earrings were, too. The gold bracelet with rubies, which I’d received for my last birthday, was actually just a “gold” bracelet with red glass. I had gathered that up, along with the “diamond” stud earrings and my “diamond” ring, and dropped them all into my purse.
“I’m sorry,” the jeweler had apologized to me again, but it wasn’t her fault. I started to head back toward my office and I didn’t notice the heat of the summer sun beating down on me or feel the humidity in the air. I didn’t hear the sounds of the Detroit traffic that I still wasn’t used to even after living here for so many months. Instead, I stepped carefully on the slanted sidewalk and ran through questions in my mind. I heard them in the voice of my Contracts professor, the guy who loved the Socratic method so much that he never stopped with it, inside or outside of class. I had always imagined that family dinners were a total nightmare for his wife and kids.
“Whose fault is this?” my mind asked me, speaking as Dr. Llewellyn. That was what I was focused on. Who was to blame?
“Hi, Camille,” the guard behind the desk greeted me as I entered my office building’s lobby. The first time I’d come here for my interview, I’d been overwhelmed by the marble walls, the polished floor, and the gold ceiling far above us. It was, he had told me, an Art Deco masterpiece. He was very proud.
“Camille?”
“What?”
“I asked, did you have a good lunch?” He was looking at me with his bushy eyebrows furrowed together.
“Lunch. Yes,” I answered. I had been wearing simulants on my finger for all this time, something that sounded a lot like alien beings from a scary movie, the kind I hated. Were they pulsating at the bottom of my purse? They might have been morphing back into their original forms, killer creatures from the depths of some asteroid that were going to burst through the leather (it looked like leather) and rip out my heart. What was left of it.
He still peered at me and now he frowned. “You ok?”
“Yes, thank you.” Another building employee asked him a question about a delivery and I escaped. I went to the elevators and automatically pushed the button, but I froze with my index finger on the plastic circle. My eyes had caught on the white band around the fourth finger of that hand, the tan line from my ring. I’d been wearing the simulants since Dax had given them to me last spring. And I’d worn the earrings since he’d given them to me for my twenty-fifth birthday. They had come in alittle box that I was sure had held an engagement ring but when I’d realized that it was actually something else, I’d also been very happy. The next year, when I’d turned twenty-six, he had fastened the “gold” bracelet with the “rubies” around my wrist. He’d remembered my erroneous excitement when he’d handed me the velvet earring box the year before and had planned ahead.
“I already took it out,” Dax had told me, and he’d laughed. “Now you’re not going to get too excited and think I’m putting a ring on it.” He’d been angry at my reaction to the earrings, but he’d come to see it as a joke. Later, he had asked me to marry him and a while after that, he really had given me a ring. But now, I saw that it was still just a joke. Everything.
“But whose fault is it?” Dr. Llewellyn intoned in my mind. I got to my floor and walked past the different offices, all with glass walls so that we could see each other perfectly clearly. I wouldn’t be able to sit and cry at my desk, in other words, but I didn’t feel like crying at this moment. I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t angry. Everything just felt wrong and slanted, and not like the reality I’d known before.
“Camille, where are we with the Greenwood project?”
“Huh?” I looked up and blinked as the newest attorney in our department barreled down the hallway. Octavia tapped her foot in its big, square-toed loafer and repeated herself in a louder voice, although she was only inches away now. Fortunately, I knew exactly where we were with that and I told her, and she was satisfied enough to barrel back to her desk. Octavia, by the way, was not my boss. She had started in the legal departmentof Whitaker Enterprises months after I did. Yes, she had many more years of experience, but no, I didn’t work for her.
I was fully aware of that but Octavia often seemed to forget. She liked to check on my projects and she liked to do it in public spaces, like hallways and the employee lunchroom. I watched through a glass wall as she flopped into her chair and then I started moving again, still stepping carefully due to the tilt that I felt in the floors here, too. Who was to blame? Not Octavia. She didn’t know anything about my relationship, probably not even that I was engaged. If she had been aware of it, she might have reacted like many other people in my life when they had heard.
“This is exciting. You’re sure, Camille?” my mom had asked when I’d called home to Kentucky with the exciting news. She had actually sounded anything but excited. Cautious, hesitant, worried…it was how everyone had responded when I’d told them that Dax and I were finally going to get married. We’d been together for so long that they should have expected it, but I hadn’t fooled myself into believing that they were going to be happy.
I had been. I had been, I repeated to myself fiercely as I sat behind my desk. These last few months had been amazing, too, full of fun and the loving attention that I remembered from when we’d first gotten together. Well, maybe they hadn’t been “full” of those things, but I had definitely noticed an uptick of good behavior. My fiancé had returned to being the Dax that I’d fallen for all those years ago. At least, he’d been like that for a lot of the time, and it had been perfect—almost. Nothing was ever without problems, because this was the real world and not a TVmovie that was going to wrap up in eighty-five minutes of actual running time, a movie with the ideal romance and a neat ending.
I loved those.
