When the car arrived to whisk them down Fifth Avenue, her father looked at them both and said, “You two are more beautiful than any diamond in the world.”

Gemma’s parents guided her inside Pavlin & Co, the vast sales floor transformed into a wonderland of sparkling diamonds everywhere you looked: in glass display cases, on the hands of the glamorous guests, and in the framed photos on the walls.

The photos were advertisements from the long history of Pavlin & Co, starting back in 1947 with a black-and-white picture—now recognized all over the world—of a man on one knee in the snow, slipping a diamond solitaire ring on the finger of a willowy brunette in a ball gown. Above them, in elegant script, the sentence A Diamond Says Love. With those four simple words, her great-grandfather had created the idea of the diamond engagement ring.

Her mother told her the story over and over again, the way other little girls were told fairy tales.

“There was a time when people didn’t buy diamond engagement rings,” her mother said, “not until our family made them important.”

Gemma’s eyes skipped forward eagerly, alighting on her favorite series of ads, the ones featuring her mother. She’d modeled for the 1994 ads wearing furs and her own pink diamond. Whenever Gemma looked at the photographs of her mother with her chin resting in her palm, the spectacular gem flashing on her finger, her big blue-green eyes staring directly into the camera, they didn’t make her long to get engaged so much as they made her long to be Paulina. She was sure lots of women in the 1990s felt the same way. Buying a Pavlin diamond wasn’t just buying a piece of jewelry—it was buying the promise of love.

They passed the orchestra playing near the gilded elevators, and her grandmother rushed toward them. Constance, with her eternally blond bouffant hair and head-to-toe designer outfits, seemed like a queen to her.

“You’re late,” Constance said. “Come along, everyone’s waiting for you.”

The rest of the family was assembled on the podium: Alan, looking distinguished in his tuxedo, and her mother’s two older sisters, Aunt Elodie and Aunt Celeste. Like her grandmother, her aunts seemed regal and somewhat unknowable. Aunt Elodie was Alan’s right hand at Pavlin & Co, while Aunt Celeste lived far away at a beach. Gemma wished she was closer with her mother’s sisters. Maybe that would help fix the nagging sense that something was wrong. She was especially uncomfortable around Elodie. There was just something about the way her aunt looked at her.

Uniformed guards encircled the podium as her grandfather stepped toward the microphone. On either side of him, glass cases displayed glittering diamond rings in every shape and color, yellow and white and even a rare blue stone set in platinum. Of course, none of them compared to the ring on her mother’s finger.