That final morning, her father filled a thermos with white wine and told Gemma to be good for the babysitter, a local village girl. Her mother helped Gemma get the knots out of her hair, tangled from swimming. Paulina was dressed in a black two-piece bathing suit with a sarong tied around her waist. The gauzy fabric had a yellow butterfly pattern, and the color was picked up by the yellow diamond studs in her ears. Her hair, too, was pale yellow, bleached from the sun. She wore it piled on top of her head in a clip, just a few tendrils escaping that brushed Gemma’s cheek when her mother kissed her goodbye.

By nightfall, her parents hadn’t returned and the village girl put her to bed. When she woke up in the morning, her grandmother was in the living room. Her first thought was, how strange to see Constance outside of Manhattan. Then her instincts kicked in and told her something was very, very wrong. And then Constance stood up, seeming, in that moment, to tower over her. There’s been an accident . . .

Sloan Pierce looked at her expectantly. Celeste passed her the pen and the document.

Gemma couldn’t do it.

47

The lie about selling the diamond came out so easily, it almost felt like the truth. Elodie gulped her lemonade, wishing it had a shot of vodka in it.

While Celeste signed the contract, Gemma’s stare was like a dagger. Who was she to judge? She didn’t know the first thing about running a business. And no, selling a few things here and there on Instagram didn’t count. Elodie had been in the trenches for decades.

Pavlin & Co had overcome obstacles like world wars and cultural shifts that made expensive jewelry obsolete. But by the late 2000s, the industry was facing the biggest threat by far: technology. Lab-grown diamonds were becoming nearly undetectable from their natural, mined counterparts. And they sold for forty percent less. Worse, jewelry buyers who did want the real thing or even just traditional gold jewelry could now shop online and have pieces shipped anywhere. The metropolitan jewelry retail epicenters of the world were losing their hold on the market.

Maybe her father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather could have found some way to pull a rabbit out of a hat and turn things around. But all Elodie could do was think of a way to get a quick infusion of cash to pay the bills. In her business, the business of dreams, cutting back was not an option.

She thought long and hard about what she could do, coming up short at every turn. And then one day, during her obsessive reading of magazines and newspapers, she came across a WWD end-of-the-decade fashion retrospective that included a photo of Paulina at some red-carpet event. The caption made a big deal about the famous pink diamond ring on her finger.