He had met Evelyn Carter in the autumn of 1984, when he was twenty-six and worked for a small property-maintenance company that paid him to do everything from repairing doors to collecting overdue invoices. She was working afternoons at a neighborhood library while finishing courses in accounting, and they first spoke because he had arrived to fix a leaking window above the reference shelves. Rain had been coming through for weeks, and nobody had managed to persuade the building owner that the problem was serious. Evelyn was the person who greeted him with a bucket, a stack of damp books, and a level stare.
"If you're here to tell me the leak isn't that bad," she had said, "you should know two shelves of city records now smell like a pond." David had laughed, though he could see she was not amused. He had returned an hour later with supplies and worked until evening, refusing to cover the stain with fresh paint before repairing the flashing that caused it.
Evelyn stayed late to help move the books. She wore a blue cardigan and asked questions about his work, not the flattering kind people asked when they wanted to sound interested, but practical questions that showed she genuinely wanted to understand why the water had found its way through the wall. When David explained that the owner had ignored several earlier repairs, she looked at the bucket and said, "I suppose buildings are like people. They get away with small neglect until the neglect becomes expensive."
David remembered that sentence years later when he began running his own company. At the time he remembered only how carefully she carried the water-damaged books and how she insisted he take a sandwich from the staff refrigerator before going home. They spoke again the following week when he returned to check the repair, and by the end of the month he was inventing reasons to walk past the library on his lunch break.
Their first proper date was at a modest restaurant whose dining room smelled of coffee and fresh bread. David was anxious about money and admitted, somewhat clumsily, that he could not afford many evenings like this one. Evelyn looked at the menu, then at him, and said, "I didn't agree to dinner because I thought you were rich. I agreed because you came back to make sure the window didn't leak. That told me more than any restaurant could."
He proposed just over a year later in the park beside the river, with a ring bought on an installment plan and a speech he had practiced so often that he forgot most of it when she began smiling. Evelyn said yes before he had finished asking. Their wedding was small, full of mismatched flowers and relatives who argued over the music, and David remembered feeling like the wealthiest man alive when they walked outside under a light autumn rain.
The sapphire necklace entered their marriage as a gift from Evelyn's aunt, a quiet woman named June who had inherited the piece and worn it only on special occasions. June told them she wanted Evelyn to have something beautiful that would not wear out, although she knew Evelyn would keep wearing