"What is it?" Sophia asked.
"Lab-made," Mr. Abrams said. "Glass, basically. Very good work. Somebody took your grandmother's sapphire out of this setting and put this in its place. The diamonds are still real. The gold is still real." He shook his head. "Just the heart is gone."
Sophia sat down on the little stool in front of the counter. Her legs didn't want to hold her up.
"When?" she said. "Can you tell when?"
Mr. Abrams looked at her over his glasses.
"I can do better than that," he said. "I can tell you who."
He went into the back of the store and came out with a thick black binder.
"Three months ago, a woman came in here. Blonde. Very friendly. She had a loose blue sapphire she wanted to sell. Six carats. With a star." He opened the binder to a page with a photocopy of a driver's license clipped to it. "In this business, we photograph everything. We take ID for everything."
Sophia looked at the license.
Chelsea Ann Ortiz.
"I didn't recognize the stone at first," Mr. Abrams said. "Loose, without the setting, after forty-five years. My eyes aren't what they used to be. I paid her thirty-eight thousand dollars." He put his hand flat on the binder. "It's been bothering me ever since. When you walked in this morning with that pendant, I knew."
"Do you still have it?"
Mr. Abrams looked at her for a long moment. Then he went to the safe.
He came back with a small white envelope and tipped it out onto the velvet.
A deep blue stone, the size of a grape.
He held it up to the lamp.
Inside it, clear as anything, was a little silver star.
Sophia put both hands over her mouth.
"I haven't sold it," Mr. Abrams said quietly. "I couldn't make myself put it in the case. I think I was waiting for somebody to come looking."
Sophia picked it up with two fingers. It was warm from the lamp.
"Did she sell you anything else?"
Mr. Abrams hesitated. Then he turned the page in the binder. And the next one.
May: a pair of pearl earrings, the clasp engraved E.M.O. June: a gold charm bracelet with fourteen charms. Sophia knew every one of them. The little Eiffel Tower from her parents' honeymoon. The tiny silver baby shoe from the year she was born.
"I bought the earrings and the bracelet before I ever saw the sapphire," Mr. Abrams said. "The earrings are gone. I'm sorry. The bracelet is still here."
Sophia counted the charms through the plastic sleeve. Fourteen. All there.
"Every month," she said. "She was selling my mother one piece at a time."
"It looks that way," Mr. Abrams said.
Sophia drove back to Coral Gables with the receipt, the photocopy, and a printout from the store camera in a folder on the seat next to her.
Her father was in his office, doing paperwork. Chelsea was by the pool again, in a different cover-up, on her phone.
Sophia walked into the office and laid everything on the desk in front of him, one page at a time. She didn't say a word. She let him read.
The photo of Chelsea at the counter, smiling. The license. The receipt. Thirty-eight thousand dollars. The date.
Rafael's face went gray.
"She told me," he said slowly, "she was taking it to get cleaned."
"When?"
"In July."
"Mr. Abrams bought it on July ninth."
Her father stood up so fast his chair rolled into the wall. He walked out to the patio. Sophia followed.
"Chelsea."
Chelsea looked up from her phone and saw his face and saw the folder in Sophia's hand, and for the first time, she looked a little bit scared.
"Did you sell Elena's sapphire?"
"Rafael, baby, let me explain..."
"Did you sell it?"
Chelsea stood up. She set her phone down on the lounge chair. And then the scared look went away, and something harder came out from underneath it.
"I had debts," she said. "Credit cards. From before. You knew that. And you had a whole box of jewelry nobody was wearing. Sitting in a drawer. For a dead woman."
Sophia flinched. Rafael didn't move.
"Get out of my house," he said.
Chelsea laughed. Actually laughed.
"Your house? Okay. Sure. Let's talk about honesty, Rafael. Since that's what we're doing today." She picked up her sunglasses and slid them on top of her head. "Why don't you tell your daughter why Elena changed her will six weeks before she died?"
The patio went very quiet. Just the sound of the pool filter humming.
Sophia turned slowly to look at her father.
"What is she talking about?"
Rafael didn't answer.
Chelsea smiled.
"Tell her who her mother's private nurse was, Rafael," she said. "The last four months. Tell her who you were texting at two in the morning while Elena was asleep down the hall."
This is a fictional story. Names, characters and events are invented. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
