Description
The morning was the color of a wet sidewalk, but inside the cramped, velvet-lined labyrinth of the Chelsea antiques market, it smelled gloriously of damp wool, old paper, and money that had changed hands too many times.
Holly didn’t look at the jewelry. Looking directly at what you wanted was vulgar; it gave the shopkeeper an unfair advantage, like showing your cards at poker before the chips were down. Instead, she adjusted her oversized dark glasses—wholly unnecessary for a rainy Tuesday indoors—and pretended an intense, sudden fascination with a chipped porcelain pug.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it.
It was half-buried beneath a stack of silver-plated fish knives, looking entirely out of place and terribly lonely. A bangle watch. It didn’t look like much to the casual eye, but under the dim incandescent bulb of the stall, the small, clear crystals bordering its face threw off a brilliant, defiant little spark. It was silver-toned, polished, and perfectly sized for a wrist that survived on black coffee, croissants, and sheer optimism.
“A trinket,” the proprietor sighed, noting her gaze with a theatrical wave of his hand. “Quartz. Probably runs on hope. Ten dollars just to clear the tray.”
Holly picked it up with two fingers, holding it to her ear. It didn’t tick. Quartz didn’t tick, not loudly anyway, but it felt cool against her skin, heavy enough to feel real, light enough to wear while running away from an overly enthusiastic suitor or hailing a checker cab at dawn.
“Ten dollars is an absurd amount of money for a Tuesday,” Holly murmured, already slipping the bangle over her wrist. It snapped shut with a satisfying, expensive-sounding click. She reached into her alligator-skin purse, bypassing three unpaid telephone bills and a rogue lipstick, to pull out a crisp ten-dollar note.
She didn’t need it to tell the time, of course. Time was an abstract concept invented by people with office jobs. But the sparkle? The sparkle was absolutely essential.
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