Part Two: The Store
Calloway Fine Jewelers — the name had given James a small private amusement, having his own surname above the door — occupied the ground floor of a building in the city’s best shopping district, the kind of block where the windows were always clean and the storefronts were lit with the particular warm-toned lighting that makes everything inside look more valuable than it is, or rather, makes the value feel tangible rather than abstract.
The interior was exactly what the window had promised. Glass cases arranged with the careful aesthetics of a space that understands display as argument: these things are beautiful, and beauty is worth what we are asking for it. The overhead lights were warm gold. The cases held necklaces and rings and earrings and several items whose category was not immediately obvious but whose craftsmanship was. The carpet was deep and absorbed the sound of the street the moment the door closed.
Lily stopped just inside the door.
Her eyes moved across the cases with the slow, appreciative attention of someone who is taking inventory of wonder. She was not grabbing or pointing or performing excitement for an audience. She was simply looking, the way she looked at things that mattered to her — with her full attention, quietly.
“Daddy,” she said. “Look.”
“I see it,” James said. He squeezed her hand.
He was aware, peripherally and immediately, of how he appeared in this room. He had been aware of this on the way here, on the street outside, and he was aware of it now with the specific acuity of someone who has spent enough time being assessed by rooms that they have learned to feel it like a change in air pressure. The grey hoodie. The jeans. The shoes that were clean but not new. He was aware of it and he had decided, a long time ago and again this morning, that it was not going to govern what he did. He was here for Lily’s birthday. The room’s opinion of his clothes was not relevant.
He guided Lily toward the case where the pendant she had noticed in the window was displayed. She found it immediately — she had been looking for it since they walked in, he realized, navigating by memory of a glimpse through glass on a Tuesday afternoon three weeks ago.
“That one,” she said. She pointed without touching the glass, because James had taught her not to touch glass in stores, and she was eight and she remembered things she was taught.
“That one,” he agreed.
He straightened, preparing to get a salesperson’s attention.
