Unbecoming (43 page)

Who’d had a child? Mrs. Graham was fifty-four now. But they could have adopted. Grace heard the refrain as if Riley were singing it to her:
always wanted a daughter.
Or a grandchild. Jim was the oldest, and Nate had had a serious girlfriend, Ashley, but was that her? Who were those women?
Wives?
Whose? Could
Riley
be a father now? Whose baby was Mrs. Graham holding? Who was she? Grace screwed her eyes onto that blurry little girl but she could not tell a thing.

The bedroom must be for her, Grace realized.

It didn’t matter whose baby it was. Mrs. Graham had got her girl.

Grace had thought that she’d left a piece of herself behind in that house, some earlier girl who haunted the attic, a sweet and sorry ghost. But she was the haunted one, and here was the evidence. All signs of her were gone, replaced now with someone real. She had not left herself behind. There was no such thing. You couldn’t leave yourself. No matter how far you went, you were always there.

Alls wouldn’t be home for hours still. Grace took a deep breath and dipped a cotton ball in acetone and began to work the hardened paint from her brush. She picked up a three-carat square-cut diamond with her tweezers and dipped it into the paint solution, deep-end blue. The
modepoppen
stared from behind their plastic windows, flat eyes fixed ahead. Grace tried not to watch the door, waiting, as she coated another gem in plastic. She knew about love. She knew all the angles.

Acknowledgments

To conduct my research, I relied on the work of many others: Erich Steingräber, Oppi Untracht, Janice Berkson, Stephen Maine, Todd Merrill’s work on James Mont, and Gregory Cerio’s
Mont
piece in
The Magazine Antiques
. Several real heists are mentioned in this novel using information from news coverage. I’m indebted to the legend of Russian jewel thief Sonya Golden Hand, who might have found Grace a bit soft.

Thank you first to Susan Golomb and Carole DeSanti; Krista Ingebretson, Soumeya Bendimerad, Christopher Russell, Kym Surridge, Clare Ferarro, Nancy Sheppard, Carolyn Coleburn, and everyone at Viking. To the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and the many writers who’ve supported me there: Nick Delbanco, Michael Byers, Doug Trevor, and especially Eileen Pollack, Peter Ho Davies, and V. V. Ganeshananthan, tireless champion. To the Hopwood Program, which gave me a boost when I most needed it. To my fellow students: Let us raise a glass in an empty Skeeps. Others encouraged me more than they know: Charlie Baxter, Julia Fierro, Valerie Laken, and Jess Row.

Love and thanks to the friends who lent their gimlet eyes to these pages over the years: Anna Brenner, Tessa Brown, Nania Lee, Anna Sheaffer, Maya West, and extra (infinite!) gratitude to Katie Lennard. Thanks to Sharon Pomerantz, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Aline Rogg, and Molly Kleinman, whose doors were always open, and to Gina Balibrera. To my family, who made me this way, especially my grandmother Joan, who watched
Antiques Roadshow
with bated breath. To every single one of my friends: you are the truest hearts, the wildest minds. To my husband, the whole valley of love.

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