Part Five: What Was True, and What Wasn’t
James Calloway was not the owner of Calloway Fine Jewelers.
This is the clarification that the story requires, and it is also the clarification that made the story — in the way that it unfolded, in that room, on that morning — more interesting than the simpler version would have been.
He was an accountant. A good one, a careful one, with a small practice that had grown steadily across fifteen years and that occupied a set of offices in a building twelve blocks from the jewelry store. He was not wealthy. He was, as previously established, a person who rearranged other things in order to do the things that mattered, which is a form of wealth that does not appear in the categories the saleswoman had been reading.
His name above the door was a coincidence. Calloway was not an unusual name. He had walked past the store on many occasions without particularly registering it as his, because it was not his, and he had not registered it as his on this occasion either.
Robert Elliot was not the regional director of any holding group. He was a retired teacher. He was sixty-two years old, and he had spent thirty-four years teaching high school history at a public school four miles from where they were standing, and he had retired the previous year and was using his Saturday mornings to explore parts of the city he had not previously had time to explore. He had come into the jewelry store intending to look for a gift for his wife’s anniversary, which was in three weeks.
He had walked in and seen what was happening.
He had made a decision in approximately four seconds.
He was not sure, afterward, where the Elliot Group had come from. It was his own name, repurposed. The regional director part had simply arrived, as improvisations do, with the conviction that makes things land.
None of this would be clear for several more minutes.
