“So not jail.”
“No. But a permanent asterisk.”
“Do you think he’s angry at us?” Bea asked, tapping her pen against her notepad.
“We didn’t fire him.” Jaxon sounded unbothered. “We reported the variance.”
She swiveled in her chair, eyes unfocused on the skyline. “A variance that blew up a very comfortable life.”
“Trenor made his choices.”
“I suppose.”
“You good for lunch tomorrow?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it.” A petty voice in her mind said that once she and Rafael were married she might not beallowedto have lunch with Jaxon anymore.
“Twelve at the usual.”
She ended the call and sat still, imagining Gavin packing up a desk he probably thought he’d retire at. But of course Jaxon was right—he’d made his bed.
Bea closed the email, and lifted her head. The floor had been waiting.
A cluster had formed three desks down, bodies angled toward one another, heads bent. Someone else leaned back in their chair just far enough to have a clear sightline to Bea’s left hand. Another pretended to refill a water bottle.
“Guys,” Bea said dryly.
“Okay, no,” said Mikaela, one of the analysts she’d started with, abandoning all pretense. “We’re not moving on from that rock.”
“Seriously, Bea,” Cheryl, one of the leads in the marketing team, added. “Do you even know what thatis?”
Despite the existential threat that now loomed around this very ring, she was amused. “A ring. We covered this three days ago.”
“My research tells me that’sLa Vérité Bleue,” Belinda, also from marketing, said reverently.
Bea frowned. “How do you know that?”
A beat. Then overlapping answers.
“Because it disappeared from the French circuit.”
“Because it’s on a list of blue diamonds that are tracked, and it was tracked to the UR.”
“No one thought it would actually surface on afinger.”
“I heard it was brought back here personally.” Amelia, a newer intern, looked ready to faint.
“Five and a half carats is already insane, but if that’s theBleueit would be worth?—”
“Why,” Maris Chen said crisply, materializing like a corrective force, “is half my floor conducting a Sotheby’s appraisal instead of working?”
The group scattered, but not before a few whispered, “Congrats again, Bea.”
“We’ll tell you more at lunch.”
People drifted back to their desks, the conversations going subterranean.
“Cruz.” Maris puckered her mouth. “For now I’ll keep calling you that. Upstairs wants to talk to you.”
