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."We'll tell him the price has gone up."Jan still had the bag of diamonds in her purse."Don't you go thinking about sneaking out a back door," Dwayne said."Half those diamonds are mine.""Why would I run off with them now when someone has promised to give us six mil for them?""Did I tell you that was my lucky number?"Only for about the hundredth time.Jan got out of the truck, opened the outer door of the jewelry store, and stepped into a small alcove.There was a second door that was locked.Through the iron bars and glass, Jan could see into the store, but not get in.There was a woman in her fifties or sixties, well dressed with a hairdo that appeared to have been pumped up with air, behind the counter.She pressed a button and suddenly her voice filled the alcove."May I help you?" she asked."Yes," said Jan."I need a quick appraisal."There was a loud buzz, Jan's cue to pull on the door handle.Once inside, she approached the counter."What were you looking to have appraised?" the woman asked politely.Jan set her open purse on the counter and discreetly picked half a dozen diamonds from the bag inside.She held them in her hand for the woman to examine."I was wondering if you could give me a kind of ballpark idea what these might be worth.Do you have someone who can do that?""I do that," the woman said."Is this for insurance purposes? Because the way it usually works is, you leave these with me, I'll give you a receipt for them, and when you come back in a week I can give you a certificate of appraisal--""I don't need anything like that.I just need you to give them a quick look and tell me what you think.""I see," the woman said."All right, then.Let's see what you have."On the glass counter was a desktop calendar pad, about one and a half by two feet, a grid of narrow black rules and numbers on a white background.The woman reached for jeweler's eyepiece, adjusted a counter lamp so it was pointing down onto the calendar, then asked Jan to put the diamonds in her hand onto the lit surface.The woman leaned over, studied the diamonds, picked a couple of them up with a long tweezerlike implement to get a closer look."What do you think?" Jan asked."Let me just get a look at all of them," she said.One by one, she studied each of the six stones.She never said a word or made a sound the entire time.When she was done, she said, "Where did you get these?""They're in the family," Jan said."They've been passed down to me.""I see.It sounded as though you had more of them in your purse there.""A couple more," Jan said."But they're all pretty much the same.""Yes, they are," the woman said."So what do you think? I mean, just a rough estimate, what would you say they were worth? Individually, that is."The woman sighed."Let me show you something."She set one of the diamonds on its flattest side directly on one of the black rules on the calendar."Look at the stone directly from above." Jan leaned over and did as she was told."Can you see the line through the stone?"Jan nodded."Yes, I can."The woman turned and took something from a slender drawer in a cabinet along the wall.She had in her hand a single diamond.She straddled it on the black line beside Jan's stone.The two diamonds looked identical."Now," the woman said, "see if you can see the line through this stone."Jan leaned over a second time."I can't make it out," she said."I can't see the line.""That's because diamonds reflect and refract light unlike any other stone or substance.The light's being bounced in so many directions in there, you can't see through it."Jan felt a growing sense of unease."What are you saying?" Jan asked."That my diamonds are of an inferior quality?""No," the woman said."I'm not saying that.What you have here is not a diamond.""That's not true," Jan said."It is a diamond.Look at it.It looks exactly like yours.""Perhaps to you.But what you have here is cubic zirconium.It's a man-made substance, and it does look very much like diamond, no question.They even use it for advertisements in the diamond trade magazines." To prove it, she reached for one sitting atop the cabinet and turned through the pages.Each one was filled with dazzling photos of diamonds."That's fake, that's fake.This one, too.The security costs for photo shoots would be astronomical if they used real diamonds for everything."Jan wasn't hearing any of this.She hadn't taken in anything after the woman said what she had were not diamonds."It's not possible," she said under her breath."Yes, well, I suppose it must be a bit of a shock if your family's been leading you to believe these are real diamonds.""So this stone," Jan said, pointing to the real diamond and thinking ahead, "wouldn't break if I hit it with a hammer, but mine would.""Actually, they both would," the woman said."Diamonds can chip, too.""But my diamonds, my cubic.""Cubic zirconium
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