“FINDING THE right stone is really a matter of luck,” Yehudah said as he lined up the VS2’s and SI1’s, already chosen from the earlier selections of color, carat, and cut, on the black velvet cloth in front of him. Jake had begun inspecting them through the loupe as he took each of them in the tightened tongs one by one, looking for “inclusions,” little spots or blemishes beneath the surface of the stone. Things that people would rather not include. Yehudah twirled a sidelock in his left hand as he spoke. “Sometimes you’ll have two stones that are technically the same value and the same number of natural inclusions. But on one of them the flaws will be situated such that some people will notice them right away, while the other will have flaws that you won’t notice unless you’re trying to find them. If you see flaws that are near the bottom of the stone, nineteen times out of twenty the prongs of the setting are going to hide it. Just luck, really.”

Jake examined each stone for what seemed to Yehudah like days on end, plotting each one’s inclusions with a pencil on a piece of paper in front of him. Without the loupe, all of them looked more or less perfect. It was when you stared at them through glass, magnified by a factor of ten, that you saw the slight abrasion on the crown, the minor scratch on the side of the pavilion, or, most maddeningly, the inclusions, the inaccessible flaws buried within the depths of the stone, the tiny internal blemishes that distinguished one diamond from another. He left no stone unturned, no facet uninspected, suddenly overcome by a desperate urge to find the perfect gem. Would it somehow, in some way so small that the prongs of the next few years would hide it, be a different marriage if he chose a different stone?

Yehudah sighed, the deep, patient sigh of a man much older than he. “Look,” he said, “take your time, but you aren’t going to find one in this class with no inclusions. And you know what? It’s better that way. If diamonds were all flawless, there would be no way to determine their worth outside of quantity. At least, there would be no way to distinguish them naturally. Not every natural feature is beautiful to the eye, but if it’s part of a beautiful thing, you have to take the whole package.”

Jake squinted at him, his eyes magnified through the loupe. “Are you trying to tell me not to look? Because I’m going to look,” he said. He smiled to let the Mad Hatter know he didn’t mean it cruelly. Yet the distrust was still real.