She stood near the door for a moment, letting her eyes adjust, and took in the floor the way a customer would. There were three people on the sales floor. A man in his early fifties, silver at the temples, wearing a dark suit that fit him well, stood behind the central case with a polishing cloth in his hand, talking in a low voice to a woman who was arranging a tray of rings. A younger woman, perhaps twenty-four, with dark hair tied back and a simple navy dress, was dusting a case near the window. A third person, a man in his thirties, was on a ladder near the back, adjusting a light. None of them greeted her. Octavia did not mind the wait in itself; she had waited in shops before, and she knew that a good greeting was worth waiting a few seconds for. She walked slowly toward the case that held the rings, and she stopped in front of the piece she had come to see. She knew it from the inventory. It was a willow-leaf emerald ring, the leaves rendered in fine gold wire, the emerald a deep green stone set at the center like a drop of water on a leaf. It was priced at nineteen thousand eight hundred dollars. It had been in the case for four months, according to the ledger, and it was one of the pieces Octavia had most admired when she was counting the trays in the evening. She had thought, when she logged it, that it was the kind of piece that needed a person to fall in love with it, not a person to be sold it, and she had wondered who that person would be.
She waited another minute. The man in the dark suit finished his conversation and walked toward her, not quickly, and not with the air of someone who was glad to see a customer. He stopped on the other side of the case and looked at her, and his look took in her denim, her canvas jacket, her sturdy shoes, and her bare hands, and it settled into something polite and closed, the way a door settles when it has not quite latched.