“Anna,” he whispered as he turned out the light on his night table, finding her hand in the darkness. It lay limp in his. “Do you remember when you told me not to hate my father?” he asked. He no longer expected answers, but that didn’t matter. He already knew what she would say. “I don’t hate him, Anna. Not anymore. You should know,” he finished. But Anna was already sleeping, her breath spilling out in tide pools on her pillow.

Bill, however, couldn’t sleep. He squeezed her hand in the dark, then put his arms around her, watching her dream. And Bill himself dreamed while still awake, dreaming her dreams for her, dreaming of the pictures of Naomi, stored somewhere in the sanctuary of Anna’s lost mind.

Chapter 8 The Better Deal

CHAPTER 8

THE BETTER DEAL

BACK WHEN the Dutch owned the entire world, fleeing their sinking country to spread their love of miniatures, chocolates, and blue and white china from South America to the South Pacific, they also planted their feet on the ground in southern Africa—ground where, a few hundred years later, a child discovered a “pretty pebble” on the farm of Nicolaas and Diedrick de Beer, leading to private Dutch control of De Beers Consolidated Mines, which would later become the largest diamond mining cartel in the history of the world. Unfortunately, like Dutch control of New Amsterdam, this state of affairs lasted about fifteen minutes, concluding when the de Beers were bought out by British conquering titan Cecil Rhodes and subsequently bought out by German conquering titan Ernest Oppenheimer. No one conquers the world for more than fifteen minutes.

Diamonds are pure carbon, pieces of coal, more or less, buried beneath hundreds of miles of molten rock, emerging one billion to three billion years later as shining stars, like hardened fire. The carbon that forms them comes from the earth’s mantle, the layer of molten matter that forms the bulk of the planet. But some diamonds come from organic matter forced into the mantle—that is, the corpses of primeval life, sunk to the bottom of the ocean, forced by earthquakes toward the center of the earth, and pushed up by volcanoes as xenoliths, or foreign rocks, to the earth’s surface billions of years later. Others come from meteorites, carbon remnants of the corpses of distant stars. Which is a long and complicated way of saying that, despite all the conquests across the surface of the earth, nothing is ever really lost.