the dusty sunbeam slanting in over his shoulder through the third of the west-facing windows. The stone sent back sparks of multicolored fire into her eyes, and for just a moment she felt a pang of regret. Then the jeweller gave her a quick look, just a glance, really, but it was long enough for her to see something in his hazel eyes she didn’t immediately understand—a look that seemed to say Are you joking?
“What?” she asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just a mo’.” He screwed the loupe back into his eye and took a good long look at the stone in her engagement ring. When he looked up the second time, his eyes were surer and easier to read. Impossible not to read, really. Suddenly Rosie knew everything, but she felt no surprise, no anger, and no real regret. The best she could do was a weary sort of embarrassment: why had she never realized before? How could she have been such a chump?
You weren‘t, that deep voice answered her. You really weren’t, Rosie. If you hadn’t known on some level that the ring was a fake—known it almost from the start—you would have come into a place like this a lot sooner. Did you ever really believe, once you got past your twenty-second birthday, that is, that Norman Daniels would have given you a ring worth not just hundreds but thousands of dollars? Did you really?
No, she supposed not. She’d never been worth it to him, for one thing. For another, a man who had three locks on the front door, three on the back, motion-sensor lights in the yard, and a touch-alarm on his new Sentra automobile would never have let his wife do the marketing with a diamond as big as the Ritz on her finger.
“It’s a fake, isn’t it?” she asked the jeweller.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a perfectly real zirconia, but it’s certainly not a diamond, if that’s what you mean.”
“Of course it’s what I mean,” she said. “What else would I mean?”
“Are you okay?” the jeweller asked. He looked genuinely concerned, and she had an idea, now that she was seeing him up close, that he was closer to twenty-five than thirty.
“Hell,” she said, “I don’t know. Probably.”
She took a Kleenex out of her purse, though, just in case of a tearful outburst—these days she never knew when one was coming. Or maybe a good laughing jag; she’d had several of those, as well. It would be nice if she could avoid both extremes, at least for the time being. Nice to leave this place with at least a few shreds of dignity.
“I hope so,” he said, “because you’re in good company. Believe me, you are. You’d be surprised how many ladies, ladies just like you—”
“Oh, stop,” she told him. “When I need something uplifting, I’ll buy a support bra.” She had never in her life said anything remotely like that to a man—it was downright suggestive—but she had never felt like this in her whole life ... as if she were spacewalking, or running giddily across a tightrope with no net beneath. And wasn’t it perfect, in a way? Wasn’t it the only fitting epilogue to her marriage? I decided on the rock, she heard him say in her mind; his voice had been shaking with sentiment, his gray eyes actually a little moist. Because I love you, Rose.
For a moment the laughing jag was very close. She held it at arm’s length by sheer force of will.
“Is it worth anything?” she asked. “Anything at all? Or is it just something he got out of a gum-machine somewhere?”
He didn’t bother with the loupe this time, just held the ring up into the sunbeam again. “Actually, it is worth a bit,” he said, sounding relieved to be able to pass on a little good news. “The stone’s a ten-buck item, but the setting ... that might have gone as much as two hundred bucks, retail. ’Course, I couldn’t give you that,” he added hurriedly. “My dad’d read me the riot act. Wouldn’t he, Robbie?”
“Your dad always reads you the riot act,” said the old man squatting by the paperbacks. “That’s what kids are for.” He didn’t look up.
The jeweller glanced at him, glanced back at Rosie, and stuck a finger into his half-open mouth, miming a retch. Rosie hadn’t seen that one since high school, and it made her smile. The man in the vest smiled back. “I could give you fifty for