“You looked very dashing in your tux tonight,” she said, asking him for help unzipping the back of her dress. The touch of his fingertips against her bare back gave her a shiver. She pulled the clips out of her hair, still long and lustrous and just now showing the first few threads of silver. She shook it loose and turned to him, wanting to remind him that Betsy Laurent-Leeds wasn’t the only woman who noticed him. But he had already retreated to the other side of the room, shedding his shirt and jacket while sitting on the edge of the bed and staring out the window.

“Alan,” she said. “It’s Friday night. You can’t carry the stress of work through the entire weekend. One bad year isn’t the end of the world.”

He looked at her with irritation. “I wish it were just one bad year.”

She sighed. Their middle daughter, Elodie, was involved in the business as well and had recently expressed her own concern.

Alan pulled back the covers. Since sex was clearly out of the question, Constance slipped into a fluffy robe and sat on her side of the bed, reaching for the hand cream on her nightstand.

“I know you’ll think of something,” she said. “You always do.” The latter comment was a small wifely lie. The truth was, while Alan was a hard worker, even a non-business-minded person like herself could see that Pavlin & Co hadn’t innovated since the “A Diamond Says Love” campaign half a century ago.

Alan climbed out of bed and left the room. When he returned he was holding a Pavlin & Co ring box. He handed it to her. “Open it,” he said, his eyes shining.

Confused, she gave him a small smile. While a gift was always appreciated, it seemed like an odd moment for one.

She lifted the lid and gasped. It was a pink diamond, the pink diamond.

Alan, in a quest for a precious stone to compete with some of the flashy gems that rival jewelers were marketing, had commissioned a dig in a remote Western Australia mine. After several years, they’d unearthed a Fancy Vivid pink diamond that was 59.6 carats in the rough. The discovery made the international news: Only one percent of all pink diamonds were larger than 10 carats, and only four percent classified as Fancy Vivid.

Alan’s gemologist studied the stone for a full year before cutting it, and then took another ten months to transform it into a 30-carat, cushion-cut gem of extraordinary beauty.