Chapter 4

Rebecca, my husband’s childhood friend, lowered the hammer while three cameras watched her work at my bench. Thomas, my husband, pointed toward her hands.

“Come closer. Rebecca will show you how our pieces receive their final identity.”

She held the brooch against the block with the clasp trapped beneath one finger. I saw the tilt before she swung.

“Lift the left side,” I said. “You’re striking across the hinge.”

Thomas kept his smile aimed at the press. “Let her work, Audrey. She knows the process.”

The blow drove the brooch sideways. Gold scraped steel, leaving a white scar across the polished back. Rebecca struck again before anyone could stop her. The second impression crossed the first, turning the maker’s mark into two crooked wounds.

A photographer lowered his camera. “Was it meant to look like that?”

Rebecca caught the brooch against her sleeve. Rouge from the polishing cloth stained the cuff.

“The block moved,” she said.

Thomas picked up the block and showed its clean base to the witnesses. “Audrey prepared the bench this morning. One of the supports must have been left uneven.”

I pulled the leather pad from beneath Rebecca’s wrist and held it up. One corner had folded when she dragged the brooch toward herself.

“The support was flat until she moved it.”

“Put that away.” Thomas covered my hand with a press sheet bearing Rebecca’s printed portrait. “We can correct the surface after the demonstration.”

“The two impressions cannot be polished out. They are too deep.”

Rebecca looked past me toward the cameras. “Gold gives us room to correct small variations. The surface can be lowered, restored, and polished without changing the design.”

Those were my words from ten minutes earlier, when she had asked why I weighed every piece before and after finishing.

A reporter raised her recorder. “So the repair is part of your design process?”

“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “I calculate the remaining weight before removing any metal.”

Thomas guided the cameras toward the display cases while I clamped the damaged brooch beneath the bench lamp.

“Repair it before they finish photographing the collection,” he said quietly.

“If I remove enough gold to clear both impressions, it falls below specification.”

“Then adjust the specification.”

I opened my mother’s sketchbook to the brooch drawing and wrote the original weight beside the scar. Rebecca continued speaking behind me, giving my measurements, my tolerances, and my order of polish as if she had learned them through years of work.

I drew the graver beneath the doubled cut. A narrow shaving rose from the gold and dropped across the press sheet.

The thin curl of gold I shaved away lay beneath Rebecca’s printed portrait, bright as a line drawn through her name.