12. Josie
JOSIE
I pulled the drawer shut under the workbench and locked it with the small brass key I kept on the same ring as the shop keys.
The tools went back into their slots, every one of them in order, the way my father had taught me when I was too young to understand why it mattered.
My hands remembered the rhythm even after all this time away from it, reaching for the burnisher first, then the files in descending order of coarseness, then the mandrel and the ring clamp and the little jeweler's saw with its hair-thin blade that I'd replaced just that morning.
First full day at the bench in weeks.
My shoulders ached. My lower back felt like someone had been using it for hammer practice.
The muscles in my neck had gone tight somewhere around hour three and never loosened up again.
I'd forgotten how the work settled into your body and made a home there, the way standing over fine details for hours turned your spine into a question mark and your fingers into something that didn't quite belong to you anymore.
But it was a good ache, the kind that meant I'd actually done something instead of just thinking about doing it while I hid at Rosa's and pretended I was fine.
The shop was quiet around me, the kind of quiet that felt earned instead of empty.
I wiped down the surface of the bench with the rag I kept folded in my back pocket, collecting the metal filings and tiny shavings of gold that caught the light as I swept them into the catch tray underneath.
My father used to say you could tell everything you needed to know about a jeweler by how they closed up shop, and I could still hear his voice in my head every time I reached for that rag.
Clean your bench, Josie. Respect the work and it'll respect you back.
I'd spent nine years not respecting it. Not coming back to this corner, not standing at this bench, not doing the one thing I was actually good at because I'd been too busy trying to fit into Vince's world instead of staying in my own.
I turned to gather the scraps into the bin when perfume hit me.
Expensive perfume, the kind that cost more than most people made in a week, invasive and deliberate, curling through the air like smoke looking for a place to settle.
I knew it before I turned around. I'd smelled it at the fundraiser, in the hallway outside Vince's office, in a dozen other places where Harlow Vane had decided to make herself unavoidable.
She stood in the doorway.
She was smiling, slow and easy, like she had all the time in the world and knew I didn't. She stepped inside without asking, without waiting for an invitation, and her heels clicked on the worn floor in sharp little punctuation marks that made my jaw tighten.
She looked around, taking her time with it, letting her gaze drift over the cases where the finished pieces sat under glass, the tools hung on their pegs, the corner where the paint had peeled years ago and nobody had bothered to fix because there were always more important things to spend money on.
"So this is the place," she said.
Her voice was light, almost conversational, like she was commenting on the weather or asking about my day. She ran one finger along the edge of the nearest display case, inspecting it the way you'd inspect something you were thinking about buying and weren't quite sure was worth the price.
"I can see why Vince calls it a liability," she said.
My hands curled into fists at my sides. The word liability sat in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold, because she'd used it before.
At the fundraiser. In front of the donors, talking about my corner like it was something that needed to be scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe.
I made myself breathe through it, slow and steady, the way you breathe through a cramp or a burn or anything else you can't afford to react to.
"What do you want, Harlow?"
She turned to look at me, her expression shifting into something that might have passed for sympathy if you didn't know better. She tilted her head, studying me like I was a puzzle she was trying to figure out, and her smile softened at the edges in a way that made my stomach turn.
"I thought you should know," she said. "Before someone else told you and made it worse."
I didn't move. I kept my hands at my sides even though they wanted to reach for something, anything, just to have something to hold onto. I waited.
"I spent the night at Vince's," she said.
The words landed flat and clean, like stones dropped into still water.
I felt the impact of them, the way they rippled out and touched everything, but I didn't let it show on my face.
I looked at her and I didn't blink and I didn't say a word.
My hand went to my pocket without me deciding to, fingers closing around the cold iron band I'd been carrying for days now.
Harlow watched me. She was waiting for something, some crack in the surface, some sign that I was breaking, and when I didn't give it to her she kept going.
"He seemed lonely," she said, her voice soft and full of false concern. "You know how men get when they're left to themselves for too long. When their wives walk out and don't come back."
I wanted her gone. I wanted her out of my shop, off my corner, out of my life entirely.
I wanted to grab her by the arm and throw her into the street and tell her never to come back, but I didn't do any of that.
I just stood there with my hand in my pocket and the iron ring pressed against my palm and let her keep talking.
"It wasn't planned," Harlow said, like she was confessing something, like she felt guilty about it and wanted me to understand. "It just happened. You know how these things go."
I didn't say anything. I didn't know how these things went because I'd spent nine years married to a man who'd never once looked at another woman, who'd never given me a reason to wonder or worry or stand in my own shop listening to someone tell me he had.
She took a step closer, her heels clicking again, and lowered her voice like we were sharing secrets. "We fucked on top of your old clothes," she said. "Right there in his bedroom. All those things you left behind when you walked out on him."
My throat went tight.
"The socks you pulled out of the drawer," Harlow continued, her tone almost gentle now, like she was trying to be kind about it.
"They were spilled all over the floor. I remember thinking how strange it was, seeing them just lying there.
And that blue scarf, the one by the bed.
I noticed it because the color was so pretty against the hardwood. "
My stomach dropped. God. She'd seen it. She'd been in that room, seen the mess I'd left behind.
"The closet was still open," she said. "I could see the shelf sitting crooked where your jeans had been, like you'd knocked it when you grabbed them in a hurry.
And that chair." She gestured vaguely, like she was picturing it in her head.
"The one you shoved against the wall when you were grabbing your things. It was still sitting there crooked."
I felt something crack in my chest. Just a hairline fracture, just enough to let the heat rise into my throat and make my breathing go shallow and uneven.
She'd described it exactly. Every detail, every piece of evidence I'd left behind in my hurry to get out of there.
The drawer I'd yanked free looking for clean socks.
The scarf I'd dropped and didn't pick up.
The closet I hadn't bothered to close because what was the point.
Harlow saw it. I watched her register the shift in my expression, the way my shoulders went tight and my face gave me away, and her smile widened just a fraction. Satisfied. Pleased with herself. Like she'd been waiting for exactly that reaction and now she had it and could savor it.
"He's better off without his liability," she said, and the word hit harder the second time because I knew exactly what she meant by it. "Honestly, Josie, I don't know what he ever saw in you in the first place."
The anger came then, clean and cold, settling into my chest like something solid I could hold onto. I straightened and looked her dead in the eye. My voice came out steady. "Get out."
She didn't move. She just stood there with that same infuriating smile on her face, calm and unbothered, like she had every right to be here and I was the one out of line for asking her to leave.
Then her gaze dropped. To my hand. My bare left hand where the diamond should have been.
"Oh," she said softly, and her smile turned sharp at the edges. "I didn't even notice. Where's your ring, Josie?"
I said nothing. I just stood there and looked at her and waited for her to finish whatever she'd come here to say.
"That ring would look so much better on someone more deserving," she said. "Someone who actually appreciates what Vince can give them. Don't you think?"
I took a step toward her, and my voice came out low and steady and absolutely done with this conversation. "Leave. Now."
Harlow held up both hands in a gesture of mock surrender, her expression shifting into something that might have looked apologetic if you squinted hard enough. "Of course," she said. "I didn't mean to upset you. I just thought you deserved to know the truth."
She turned and walked toward the door, her heels clicking out that same sharp rhythm against the floor, and I stood there watching her go.
She didn't look back. She just walked out into the evening light and disappeared around the corner, and the perfume stayed behind, heavy and cloying, wrapping itself around my throat like hands.
The door swung shut.
I stood there in the silence, breathing in that expensive floral scent that made my stomach turn, my hand still closed around the iron ring in my pocket.
The metal was warm now from my body heat, and I rubbed my thumb over the surface of it without thinking, tracing the places where Vince's tools had left marks all those years ago when he'd hammered it into shape with his own hands.
I wanted Harlow to be lying.
God, I wanted it so badly I could feel it like a physical thing, like hunger or thirst or any other need that gets under your skin and refuses to let go.
I wanted her to have made the whole thing up, to have walked in there and seen my things scattered across the bedroom and invented the rest out of spite or jealousy or whatever it was that made someone like Harlow Vane decide to come to my shop and hurt me.
But she'd described it exactly. The socks spilled across the floor. The scarf I'd dropped. The open closet with the hangers bunched to one side where I'd yanked my jeans free. The chair I'd shoved against the wall when I grabbed my jacket off the back of it.
She couldn't have known those things unless she'd been there. Unless she'd stood in that bedroom and looked around and seen all the evidence of me leaving, all the proof that I'd torn through the place and left wreckage in my wake.
Which meant maybe the rest of it was true, too.
Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe she'd walked into that room after I left, after whatever had actually happened between her and Vince, and seen the mess and decided to use it.
To build a story around the pieces I'd abandoned and deliver it with just enough truth to make me believe the lie.
Maybe Vince had turned her down and this was her way of getting even, poison delivered with a smile and wrapped up in details she couldn't have invented on her own.
I didn't know.
That was the worst part, the thing that made my hands shake and my breathing go uneven and my chest feel like something was sitting on it. I didn't know, and I couldn't figure it out by standing here replaying the conversation in my head. I couldn't know unless I asked him.
Unless I looked Vince in the eye and made him tell me the truth, whatever that truth turned out to be.
I grabbed my keys off the counter and locked the shop behind me, my hands moving through the familiar motions without me having to think about it.
Deadbolt first, then the main lock, then the gate that came down over the front window.
The street was quiet, most of the other shops already closed for the evening, Omar's laundromat dark except for the security light in the back, Rosa's restaurant just starting to fill up with the dinner crowd.
My car was parked at the curb where I'd left it that morning, and I got in and sat there for a second with my hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.
My heart was pounding. My throat felt tight.
I didn't want to do this, didn't want to drive to the tower and ride the elevator up to the penthouse and ask Vince if he'd slept with Harlow, didn't want to see whatever expression crossed his face when I said her name.
But I couldn't not do it, either. I couldn't go back to Rosa's and pretend this conversation hadn't happened, couldn't lie awake tonight wondering if my husband had fucked another woman on top of the clothes I'd left behind.
I had to know.
I started the engine and pulled into the street, heading for the tower.