smelled like and sounded like on an ordinary morning. She had done the same thing at other shops over the years, not to catch anyone but to learn, because a jeweler who only ever saw her own shop from behind the counter did not really know it. She walked down Glisan Street in the morning light, past the coffee shops opening their doors and the delivery trucks double-parked along the curb, and she pushed open the door of Aster and Grey and stepped into the smell of polished wood and the quiet that she remembered from years before. The cases gleamed. The carpet was deep and dark. A chandelier hung over the center of the floor, throwing a soft light that made the diamonds in the nearest case sparkle without glare. It was, she thought, a beautiful shop. It was also, she noticed within thirty seconds, a shop in which no one had looked up.
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.
"Can I help you?" he said. His voice was smooth and practiced, the voice of a man who had said the same words ten thousand times and had learned to make them sound helpful without committing himself to helping.
"I would like to see the willow-leaf emerald ring," Octavia said. She pointed to it, clearly, so there would be no mistake about which piece she meant.
The man glanced at the ring, then back at her. "That piece is by-appointment viewing," he said. "We keep our finer pieces for clients who have booked a consultation. I can take your name and arrange a time later in the week, if you like."