Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
She leads me to a display near the back wall. A necklace, laid out on dark velvet under glass. Gold chain, fine as a hair, with a pendant: a single stone, pale green, teardrop-shaped, in a setting so delicate it looks like the gold was poured around the stone by hand.
"Eighteenth century," Mila tells me, her voice gone hushed, reverent by reflex. "Russian. The setting is original." She unlocks the case, lifts the necklace out, holds it up so the light catches the stone, and the pale green flares and dims and flares again and I'm gone, I'm completely gone, because my hands are already itching to touch it and my throat is already doing that tight thing it does when I see something beautiful that was made by someone's hands a long time ago.
"Isn't it extraordinary?" Mila breathes. "The craftsmanship. Someone made this two hundred years ago with tools we'd consider primitive, and it's still perfect."
"It's beautiful," I blurt, and I know I sound like a child at a museum, but I've never learned to be cool about beautiful things and I've given up trying. A perfectly glazed piece of porcelain or a hand-stitched seam or light hitting old gold, and something in me just goes oh and my fingers itch to touch and Madame Gilles used to say I wore my heart on my sleeves and my sleeves were always rolled up.
"Here." Mila holds it toward me. "Feel the weight."
I take it. The gold is cool and heavier than I expected and the pendant rests in my palm like a held breath. My thumb runs over the setting, feeling the grooves where a craftsman's tool once pressed, two hundred years between my fingers and his, and my throat goes tight and my eyes sting and I don't even care if that's dramatic because this is a two-hundred-year-old necklace in a twenty-year-old palm and I can feel the person who made it through the gold and I will never, never get tired of that feeling, the feeling of someone's hands reaching across centuries to touch mine through the thing they created.
Mila's head tilts as she watches me cradle it. Her smile is warm.
"You appreciate things," she observes. "I noticed that about you. Most people on this ship see the price tag. You see the work." A pause, and her smile doesn't change but her eyes hold mine a beat longer than the smile warrants. "It's refreshing. Like having a child around."
I set the necklace back on the velvet. "I should get to the spa."
"Go, go." She waves me off, already turning to her portfolio, already somewhere else. "We'll have lunch later, yes?"
We have lunch later. She tells me about the gallery's collection, about the family that owns it, the Almazovs, who she refers to with the easy familiarity of someone who's been in their orbit so long she's forgotten that other people find them intimidating. "Alexei chose most of the Russian pieces himself," she shares between bites of salad, "he has a very specific eye." She tells me about acquisitions and provenance and the art of authentication, and I listen because it's interesting and because she's interesting and because I like her.
I do.
But.
There's a but, and I can't locate it. It sits at the edge of my awareness like an off note inside an otherwise perfect chord, and you can't quite point to it but you can feel it and it makes your teeth itch. She says something kind and I believe it and then ten minutes later I'm replaying it and finding the splinter.
Like having a child around. Was that a compliment or a measurement?
She bought me a coffee, remembered the sugar, but also told me yesterday, "You're so sweet, it's almost hard to believe you're old enough to be working here," and when I told her I was twenty she laughed. "Twenty! To be twenty again," and her eyes did something I can't name. They went somewhere else for half a second, somewhere cold and calculating, and came back, and the warmth was exactly the same as before. Exactly. As if she'd practised it.
Maybe I'm imagining it. I'm twenty and she's in her thirties and she's been on this ship longer than I've been a therapist and she knows the Almazovs by name and she probably thinks I'm a sweet, harmless kid who needs looking after.
Maybe that's all it is.
Maybe I need to stop overanalysing the only woman on this ship who's been kind to me and just eat my lunch and be grateful.
Note to self: stop finding splinters in gifts. Not everything is a puzzle. Some people are just nice.
I SEE THEM TOGETHER on Wednesday night.
I'm leaving the spa late, because a client ran over and I stayed to restock the oils and wipe down the tables because Mr. Green does spot checks and I'd rather be tired than sloppy. The staff corridor on Deck 5 runs past the Tranquil Antique Gallery, and the gallery is dark except for a single lamp at the back, throwing a yellow circle across a table I haven't seen before. Not a display table. A working table.