"I don't," he said, and realized how much he needed her to know it. "I measure it by the fact that I get to sit here with you. The necklace is only a way of saying I remember who helped me become the man sitting across from you."
Evelyn opened the box again. She lifted the pendant carefully, the blue stone resting against her palm, and David showed her the little envelope tucked beneath the lining. She unfolded the card and read the message Emma had written in her neat, careful script: Forty years ago, you believed in me when I had nothing. I have never forgotten.
Evelyn pressed the card to her chest. The tears came then, quietly and without embarrassment, and David moved around the table to put his arms around her. She laughed once through the tears and told him he was a dreadful man for making her cry on an evening when she had gone to the trouble of putting on mascara. He kissed her temple and told her he thought the mascara was surviving remarkably well.
She let him fasten the necklace around her neck. His fingers were slower than they had been forty years earlier, and the tiny clasp took two attempts, during which Evelyn offered advice and he insisted he needed no assistance. When he finally stepped back, the sapphire rested just beneath her collarbone, not identical to the old one but familiar enough that the years between them seemed to fold gently together. He looked at her with the same astonishment he had felt in the library when she first offered him a sandwich.
"How does it look?" she asked, already knowing what he would say. "Beautiful," David answered. She raised an eyebrow.
"The necklace or the woman wearing it?" He smiled. "The woman. The necklace is doing its best to keep up."
Evelyn laughed and drew him close again. Then she grew serious. "Tell me about the girl at the store," she said. "The one who helped you. I want to know what she did and whether she understands why it mattered."
David told her about Emma in greater detail than he had the evening before. He described the way she had examined the photograph before asking the price, the care she took when choosing the setting, and the calm firmness of her voice when Victor destroyed the card. He admitted that he had worried about what standing up to her manager might cost her, and Evelyn nodded with the practical concern of someone who remembered working under people with more authority than judgment.
"Don't send her flowers and call it done," Evelyn said. "Give her the kind of workplace where she won't have to choose between rent and basic decency next time. And don't turn her into a mascot because she happened to be kind to you. Teach the other people how to do what she did."